About Buddy
Our Mission
Our Vision
Our vision is for Buddy to be included among the nation’s elite design and development businesses — to be known for the exceptional quality of our work; the quality of our team; being great people to work with; and operating with integrity, transparency, honesty, and decency.
Our “Why”
Because we want to show the world that you can be successful, and have a successful organization, by doing the right things: treating people well; empowering high performers to thrive; being honest, open, and collaborative; doing exceptional work; building an organization that we’re proud to be a part of.
Our Values
The highest quality
- Creating work that looks amazing and functions flawlessly, with impeccable attention to detail
- Differentiating ourselves with the quality of our work and customer experience, rather than aspiring to be the fastest or cheapest
- Being okay passing on client work if it’s not a fit with who we are, our strengths, or values
The highest quality
- Prioritizing honesty, integrity, transparency, and decency
- Creating a low-stress work environment for ourselves and our clients -- other than the pressure we put on ourselves to do exceptional work
- Enjoying our work and lives, balance, and flexibility
- Having work be fun
- Doing things in a way that we’re proud of who we are, what we do, and what we’re building together
The highest quality
- Working with great people, and being great people to work with
- Being honest about what we’re good at and what we’re not
- Pushing ourselves and each other to maximize our potential, collectively and individually
A highly talented design agency focused on your needs.
Are we a match?
We’d love to work with you! But, candidly, it’s important to us to take on work only when we know it’s a good fit and we can knock it out of the park for you, rather than over promising and under delivering. This brief Q&A covers some topics that you might be wondering about.
The cost to build a website varies on a lot of factors, including how many pages your website will include, whether or not it will use e-commerce, how much custom design work is needed, if we are helping with SEO (search engine optimization), and other related factors.
Also, in full transparency, Buddy is generally priced mid-range for the industry. We’re definitely not the most expensive team, but we’re also not the cheapest. We focus first and foremost on quality work and a quality customer experience, rather than churning out fast and cheap websites.
That said, for situations where we build a website for a client and then hand over the keys, so to speak, simple, small websites with Buddy typically run in the $5-10k range, and go up from there. If you need a blog built out, expect a little more, and adding an e-commerce store will add a few thousand to the cost, depending on how large your store is.
By comparison, Buddy does also offer affordable full-service website design, development, maintenance, and update plans, which we call our All-In-One website plans. Learn more about those options here.
As a general rule of thumb, for a basic website we typically estimate 10 weeks, depending on what our current workload is. We might be able to shorten that time frame a bit, but generally we find that amount of time is needed to provide sufficient time to develop clients a great website, and for clients to have adequate time to provide input in our collaborative process.
We work with companies of all shapes and sizes, from a wide range of industries. The common denominator typically isn’t industry-specific, but more so that Buddy’s clients are looking for a new website that is built well, looks incredible, is easy to manage, and that will help differentiate their business as a leader in their field.
We primarily focus on using WordPress as a content management system for the sites we build. It’s popular, robust, effective, well-supported, and easy to use.
Officially the business is headquartered in the Madison, Wisconsin area (and formerly in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area) but our core team members work remotely from their homes across the US. We also have support team members world-wide. This approach has allowed Buddy to build an awesome team of incredibly talented designers and developers, and offers team members the flexibility and freedom to do their best work.
Our team is comprised of a small and select group of designers, developers, project managers, and quality assurance experts. When you work with Buddy, you will have a dedicated team for your project including a project manager, designer and/or developer team, and a quality assurance team member.
Absolutely – in some cases we work with marketing teams with established brands and brand guidelines, and in other cases we help clients create their own custom branding. Both are great.
If you’re interested in working on a website build with Buddy, we start off projects with a kickoff call together where we bring you and our design and development team together, along with our project manager, to recap goals for your website, design aesthetics, and also make sure we are all teed up regarding website hosting and any other resources we might need.
After this kickoff call, we’ll go through an iterative process where the Buddy team will work on design and development creation and revisions, in parallel with deliberate design reviews for you and your team to provide feedback and direction as necessary.
Once the site is fully built, we’ll do a thorough testing process to ensure your site is working great, and when everything is set, we’ll go live with your new website. Then, just to be sure, we’ll do one last round of quality assurance and testing to make sure everything is working on the live site.
We’ll wrap up our project together with a handoff call where we’ll show you how to manage your website and make updates, and make sure you have everything you need. We’ll also provide a written guide for your site, and are happy to create tutorial videos if needed, as well.
Absolutely. You can follow this link to learn more about service and maintenance options.
Buddy Web Design & Development
Let’s Work Together
