Request a Quote Forms: Good or Bad?
Posted August 23, 2010 @ 3:06 PM, by Marc, in Business, BWS, Client — 6 
I’ve always wondered if it’s a worthwhile effort for a service-based company to build, then field inquiries from, a request a quote form on their website.
A What?
Well, Query McCheery, a request a quote form is similar to your average contact us form, but it has additional fields that ask for project-specific details such as:
- Type of project
- Project goals
- Project budget
- Project deadline
- Special considerations
- …and so on
A visitor who is searching for a company that provides services they are in need of will often fill out a request a quote form to start the conversation between themselves and the company. The purpose of such a form, for the company anyway, is to act as a filter for project inquiries. If someone uses the form to submit information that is not inline with the service company’s offerings, project or client goals, availability, etc., then a polite email can be sent back that says, in more words than this, thanks, but no thanks.
A Summer Internship
Posted June 11, 2010 @ 6:41 PM, by Marc, in Business, BWS — 8
They say that you should try to hire people who are smarter than you are, so please take a moment to congratulate me because I’ve done that very thing. Between the end of this month and half-way through August, the talented Bruce W. Spang—‘W’ for Win, probably not his real middle name—will be the smartest person working at Boston Web Studio. As magical as that may be, I regret to inform you myself that it’s not a permanent position, something about Bruce finishing high school, so the increase in office-awesomeness will be but a moment in the company’s lifetime.
ExpressionEngine’s Deny Duplicate Data Preference
Posted March 10, 2010 @ 10:51 PM, by Marc, in Client, ExpressionEngine — 1
There’s a preference in the ExpressionEngine control panel called Deny Duplicate Data which, if turned on, will instruct EE to check if new content submitted by a user is a duplicate of existing content already in the database. It’s a moderately helpful measure in the fight against comment spam, but it recently was the cause of a minor client work-flow issue and it succeeded in confusing me for about fifteen minutes before I finally realized that this preference was the culprit. I thought it would be wise to write this blog entry in case it happens to me again, or if anyone is searching the web looking for a solution to this same dilemma.
