Interview Transcript

My name is Robert Sandlin. I’m with flooringmarket.com. We are an online provider of flooring and flooring related products to customers all across the United States. A few months ago we decided that we needed a new website. Our old website did its job but we were ready to take it to the next level and we started looking for a company that could develop the best website out there in our business and our field. We needed something custom. Not just something off the shelf, an off the shelf shopping cart. We needed a custom shopping cart that really met our specific needs and a web site that did everything we wanted it to do without making any compromises.

We started approaching web companies based here in Chicago and the ones that actually did call us back that we met with, every time we met with someone they wanted to put us into their ecommerce shopping cart box that they already had. And what we wanted to do they’d either tell us, “that can’t be done” or they looked at us like we were crazy. They didn’t understand what we were talking about and we knew we weren’t crazy. We knew what we wanted and what we needed for our business. We weren’t happy with any one we met with. So I kept searching for development companies. I found desme online. They had a great website. I liked on the desme website what the clients had to say, the clients that desme’s worked with. When you’re looking for a web development company for you’re looking at their website too and it made me want to call. I called desme, had a great conversation, told them what we needed. That afternoon someone was at our office, in person. We went over what we needed from our website. They didn’t tell us we were crazy. They knew exactly what it was we wanted to do, knew it won’t be a problem, it was not too much for them. And that same day someone was here and within a couple of days we had a proposal that was hand delivered to our office. It was customized just for us and we went with it, that day and couldn’t be happier.

The process of working with desme to build the website was great from the beginning. They started by giving us a simple questionnaire. Trying to find out more about our business and talking to find out what are needs are and how our business worked and what we did. For there we developed step by step; from that questionnaire, to working through the process of deciding the design and the colors and from there going into a live draft. Every step of the way desme was in communication with us, talking with us and we felt like we were part of the process. As we worked on it on a day to day basis, Enam and I would talk strategy on where we were going with the website and what we needed to do. But the great thing is we were assigned out own account executive who communicated with us on a daily bases. If I needed something or needed a change made or had a questions I could call our account manager and get an immediate response back and as changes needed to be made to the site and we said can you change this, add this over here. Every change that we needed to make was easy, like, “Yes we can do that!” Call our account manager. They would get a work order done for it and by the next day or two days later we could see those changes on our draft website already. It was great having someone to be able to work with to feel that we were important to desme as a client and our project was as important to us as it was to them is how they made us feel about it. desme and our account manager always tried to keep us on track with our goals and our timeframe, when we needed it to be done. And desme did it for us all within that timeframe that we had.

The great thing was even before the website was complete we could see it was going to be beyond what our expectations were. That was the really exciting thing because our expectations were really high. Now that it’s pretty much complete it’s certainly beyond what my expectations has exceeded. It has functionality to it that I never even dreamed of or suggested. So it’s not only that they gave us what we asked for but they gave us more than we asked for and more than we even realized that we needed but turns our we do need. Certainly now compared to our competitors websites we feel confident we have the nicest website out there in our field without any question.