Provision of top-quality website-design services
Kirill Vasiliev — co-founder and CEO of IQB Group, a dynamically growing company capable of realizing the most diverse projects with the use of the whole spectrum of all the latest IT possibilities on the Russian website design services market — recently spoke to TRCW about his company and its goals as well as the other aspects of the robustly growing Moscow segment of the market and the general trends and perspectives of the industry as a whole.
The Russian website design services market for business promotion is on the rise. As a CEO of one of the leading companies rendering such services in Moscow, how would you characterize this market today?
Today, the market is growing mainly due to the increase in service costs caused by growth in personnel costs. This forces a large number of website-designing companies to use freelancers, a policy that enables them to reduce production costs but at the expense of quality. I would like to emphasize that market growth is unpredictable because of the absence of a regulatory legal base. This is because this industry is partially regulated by the Advertisement Law and partially by the part of the Civil Code that regulates intellectual property rights. However, these laws have failed to provide a unified definition for a website and how to classify its production. I would also like to note that website design at present is viewed as a service rendered as a part of contractual relations, though, in my opinion, I see it more as production.
As a continuation of the first question, how do you see your company – IQB Group – on the market today and in the near future?
Our company IQB Group has been on the market now for almost five years. As before, we always apply an open relationship policy — both within the Group and with our customers — and, this unfailingly always leads to the establishment of high-quality business processes. Such policy for running a business is always a sure winning formula, both today and in the future. The only problem today is the absence of well-formulated concepts and terms at the legislative level, which is preventing the creation of a fully transparent market. As one of the key players on this market, IQB Group influences its growth and development rate, evident in the company’s turnover, which has almost been doubling every year since its foundation. For instance, according to our estimates, IQB Group was one of the Top 10 design studios in terms of market turnovers in 2007.
What are the key trends when designing websites for business promotion?
I would like to come back to the basics here. To start with, everything depends on the definition of the objectives and set tasks. The Internet is growing simultaneously in all directions: in some cases, this growth is qualitative and in the other cases it is quantitative. As the last year has shown, a lot of people nowadays start their plans to set up private businesses from setting up corporate websites this is now a fashionable trend. Naturally, the scale of the future business and expected level of capitalization influence the volume investments earmarked for the creation of such sites. However, large-scale companies, which have been operating in their industries for several years, understand that it is not fashion that is driving them to upgrade their websites, but the need to achieve their stated objectives. The Internet audience is growing every hour; this growth is measurable, controllable and active and is ready to absorb substantial flows of information. Any business can grow on such soil.
What makes ‘a good website’ and ‘a good client’ from your professional point of view?
I would like to start from the second part of the question. I must note that there are no bad clients, but poorly set tasks and objectives. This is mainly the company’s management problem, because not all client-companies have employees who understand what a website is, what problems it can solve, what are the thing to do first and what is to be done last. In my opinion, a good website means a well-thought-out plan of actions comprising a complex approach to the realization of the set tasks and objectives, as well as the selection and application of the required technologies, the provision of security and high level of fault-tolerance capabilities, meeting the hosting requirements and a lot of other minute details. Creating websites without knowing these factors will turn into poor attempts to ‘guessing’ the customers’ wishes.
Why, in your opinion, should customers choose your company out of the numerous companies rendering these services in Moscow, in other words, what are your competitive advantages in this industry?
Our key advantage is detailed project documentations, which protect both parties within the frameworks of the signed contracts. We pay serious attention to the process of our project preparations and project-related documentations, which helps to form high-quality relations between our company and its clients. The ultimate aim of our work with any client is not just the execution of the task at a high-quality level within the contractual terms, but also the establishment of long-term relations, which is the recipe for success. Right at the initial stage of interactions with potential clients, when their needs and objectives are noted and offers made, we try to take into account all the specific features of the resources of the future site. This enables us to negotiate with the clients professionally, while displaying a high level of understanding their problems and set tasks and objectives. Besides, IQB Group is a certified partner of 1Ñ-Bitrix. This partnership, combined with our extensive professional portfolio and expertise in this industry, enables us to create fully automated websites, which do not require any further maintenance costs after delivery.
There is a huge dispersion between prices and offered services in this industry. In this context, how would characterize the services offered by IQB from the point of view of the popular ‘price-to-quality-ratio’ marketing formula?
As mentioned above, this dispersion will remain until the adoption of legal documents regulating the industry. This is not because all the companies are unique, but because the same product is given different names. For instance, these two terms “business-card site” and “corporate site” are in fact, one and the same thing, but clients see them as different things because this is ‘dictated’ by the market. Also, when a website is created by using the Content Management System, the number of pages such sites will have is not important from the technological point of view. Similarly, the number of pages on a site does not affect the cost, because what really matters is the technology that will be used to create these pages. Indeed, the price-quality ratio is obviously one of the key parameters influencing the decision-making process with regard to signing a contract. At the same time, our goal is to have as much information as possible about the project such as the terms, conditions, assessment criteria, etc., to enable us to formulate the best offers for our customers and satisfy their needs by 100%.
What should potential clients expect when ordering a website design from your company?
All clients will receive productive, intellectual and joint cooperation from our company. This is the only way to achieve outstanding results. I would also like to note that success in this cooperation is 90% guaranteed, if clients are mainly result- and not process-oriented, as it is periodically the case.
Web design,