Why We Created the “FAST TRACK” Web Site |

Travis McAshanDevelopment
Oct 2009

The Creation of the Glide Fast Track

This product was created after spending years and years hearing people want a marketing website that has everything they need for a price that we simply couldn’t meet. Our “aha” moment came when we told a client that we “hand-coded” all of our custom websites from scratch because that was the “craftsman” way to do things. His answer was “why in the world would I want that”, and went on to describe why he just wanted a great website and didn’t care how it was created.

This was the first “shot across the box” of our high-end custom website design process. Over the years, I realized that as more and more template and online site-builder solutions came, there was a need for a low-cost, easy to access way of building a solid online presence for small businesses. Typically, the price point put these website seekers well below the budget range of a custom designed website.

Quite frankly I was frustrated on how many people desperately wanted our services but simply didn’t have the budget. The Glide “Fast Track” website solution is something that we have thought about and pondered on for many years, and it has finally been birthed out of a deep need for high quality work at a lower cost than traditional custom website design. Additionally, the time to market and ease of getting started is also significantly lowered making the benefits “too high” for most business owners to ignore.

Recently, over the last few months we have been clarifying our service offering and asking potential customers and business owners their thoughts about this service offering along with it’s features, benefits, and price points. To our surprise there seems to be a strong need for this service in a wide variety of industries.

Are We Replacing a Product?

We believe we are merging two product categories, and in essence replacing both at the same time. Essentially, we’re taking our skills and abilities in high-end custom website design and mixing them with the ease, cost, and process of launching a pre-built website. The result is pre-built sites that share many more characteristics with well-thought and expertly crafted custom websites while having the speed of creation and lower overall cost of their cousin poorer crafted template websites available online.

The other major difference, aside from a clear overall quality difference, is that we’ll be adding the the services of a web design and online marketing company which you rarely receive when purchasing a template website solution. The idea is that you now have a partner in your online efforts as opposed to having to traverse the web alone in your efforts to achieve online success.

Price, Quality, And Delivery

The great difference about the “Fast Track” process is that we don’t start until the client delivers everything needed to complete the project. Additionally, once we have this information there is no “back and forth,” typical with custom web design. This means that the sales agent delivers a nicely packaged file with all the clients required information. The developer then proceeds to create the site and deliver in a fixed timeline. The system is created in a way where scalability is simply adding developers to the queue and eventually more sales personnel. While this process is not infinitely scalable the process will allow for large amounts of growth on a fast timeline.

How Will We Market This Product?

The marketing plan is still evolving but the most important avenues for marketing will be through the corporate website, organic search engines, paid advertising, email marketing, word of mouth marketing, and local partnership promotions.

Is Our Pricing Set In Stone?

We plan on matching our pricing based on our customers needs first and foremost, and second, on making sure that the product is profitable and sustainable. We realize that contractor labor and other costs have the potential to fluctuate, so we plan on being flexible in raising or lowering the costs based on market demand.

How Can We Actually Create The Product?

If we somehow hit our fixed limit on the amount of “Fast Track” sites we can sell, we’ll have a few other solid avenues of revenue. They will be the semi-custom websites and full custom. The hard limit of the amount of “Fast Track” sites we can produce will limit our production and we’ll simply have to put the new sales in a timed sales queue that allows us to manage the flow. If we see the queue of sold but pending projects increasing to a unacceptable level, we’ll be faced with the strategy of increasing the cost, increasing our capacity capabilities, or simply lowering our sales output goals.

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Why We Created the "FAST TRACK" Web Site

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