What is Ballyhoo?

Ballyhoo is an Aalst, Belgium based firm specializing in web design. Founded in 1998, Ballyhoo was created to service the growing need of organizations, artists and companies who required unique and graphic well designed web sites.

Do you only design artistic web sites?

Even though the company initially serviced the arts and entertainment industries, we have worked since then in various other industries and created sites and flash animation for organizations in the medical industry, restaurant business, cultural & social organizations, artists, tourist and transport industries, as well as others. We understand the needs of just about any type of organization, and create the web design that you and your audience require.

Where does that name come from ?

'ballyhoo' is American slang from the fifties. It stands for 'noisy publicity or advertising'; 'vulgar or misleading ways of attracting attention' and
'uproar'. It's up to you to judge whether this is good publicity for a web design firm.. or it sucks.

What does it cost to build a Web site?

Generally speaking, it can reasonably cost anywhere from 1.500 € to well over 6.000 € to build a web site.

So why is this price range so large?

There are different types of Web sites, with different types of functionality, that can require anywhere from 1-4 + people to build.
And it can also take anywhere from 40 hours to several months to build a Web site.
You could say, there are 3 types of web sites: static, dynamic and flash sites.
1. A static web site is build without flash, is not database-drive and can not be updated by the customer, but according to his needs, can be updated by Ballyhoo.
2. The content of a dynamic web site, is database-drive the client has a user friendly interface, to maintain his content himself.
3. A flash site is a fully flash animated site with interactivity.

What is a ‘database-driven’ (dynamic) web site and why would I want/need one?

A ‘database-driven’ Web site is a site that displays pages to a visitor based upon content (data/text/pictures/documents) in a database.
When Web sites were first appearing on the Internet, most sites consisted of many pages of information. If a company wanted to display and/or sell 1,000 items in their Web site, a Web designer would have had to build at least 1,000 pages. This became not only very time consuming, but very problematic when information had to be updated. Now, a Web site can have thousands of pages that are all controlled by the data within one or more databases.
One of the biggest advantages is that you can add, edit and delete items in it very quickly. Once the information is changed in the database, and it is uploaded to the Web server, all information that is in the Web site, becomes updated immediately.
Database-driven Flash sites became more popular these days. But Ballyhoo doesn’t build database-driven Flash web sites, because for now, it will most likely still be to your advantage to have a database-driven site without Flash (for example concerning the ‘pageranking’ in search engines).

What is Flash and why are so many sites built in Flash these days?

Flash is the modern name for a program that started out as one of the early design tools that allowed designers to animate various things on the Web. The original intention was to allow designers to animate vector graphics. However, as designers started to experiment with this technology, designers started to use this technology to animate bit-mapped images and add music and spoken word.
A few years ago, Macromedia purchased the program, renamed the technology ‘Flash’ and has advanced the program a long way from its original abilities. Now Flash is used to create video that can be downloaded and viewed quickly over the Internet, it is used to listen to music, used in TV commercials, and used to create entire Web sites. Web sites now come to life with various animated sequences, audio and video. Flash has truly revolutionized the way that Web sites are designed and viewed. These days, you will find many sites designed entirely out of Flash. The Internet has come a long way in the last 10 years. Now, with the event of high bandwidth access (ADSL, Cable, etc.), we can now all enjoy things that took forever to see or download.
Still, there are several major technological limitations and we have found that some design firms may not be using today’s technologies in the customer’s best interests. Even though Ballyhoo is a big fan of Flash, we do not believe that Flash should be used in all instances.

Aren’t Web design fees much lower these days?

‘Yes’ and ‘no’.
The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In 1995, designers were building very simple types of Web sites for 2.000 €. These types of sites can now be built by companies for 500 - 750 € or just about anybody with a simple to use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) program. Also some agencies buy ready-made templates for 6 up to 80 € and sold to a lot of customers.
However, professional designers are now building very sophisticated sites, with tools that were not available 10 years ago, that take weeks to create and a team of 2,3 or more people. These (static) web sites typically cost less and dynamically driven and flash web sites generally cost more.

How long does it take to build a Web site?

Most of the Web sites that Ballyhoo builds are very similar in the number of people required and the total number of hours. Therefore, we quote 4-6 weeks for a small average site that we build up to 2-3 months.

Do you offer Hosting?

No, Ballyhoo does not provides Web site hosting services. We do recommend several very good hosting companies and give advice concerning costs and other basic technical aspects you should now.

Do you offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization services) ?

‘Yes’ and ‘no’.
SEO is an expensive word for an amount of techniques to make a web site ‘score’ at Google or other search engines.
The most important ‘SEO’ rules are simple but effective. A Google ‘pageranking’ by Google and other search engines, still depends a lot upon your content and the technical development of the site. We can easily apply these rules and advice you about your content, so there is no need to hire ‘SEO specialists’ because there is still no proof nor guaranty that it works.
If you want to know more about SEO, the best thing to do is to read Googles guidelines. If you want to start reading about this subject: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters

Google..

To score on Googles search engine, Ballyhoo Webdesign & Graphics generates the specific Google sitemap (xml file) for all the web sites created by us.

What’s involved in building a Web site?

Building a Web site can be a fairly complex process depending upon the type of Web site and the your needs. Here is a basic outline of the steps that we take starting with the initial conversation with the client:
1. Discuss the needs and desires of the client and the targeted audience.
2. Create a proposal with a site map that outlines how we will meet those needs. When the client is satisfied with the proposal, we provide an offer with the terms of the proposal and the ‘deadline’ embodied into it.
3. Assemble the team of specialists to work on the project and define the task of each specialist and create a time line for the project.
4. As each specialist completes a phase of the project, the customer is shown the work and asked for feedback.
5. When all phases of the project are completed and approved by the customer, the site goes through an initial launch. The site goes through final testing by Ballyhoo.
6. Customer gives user feedback after initial launch to make improvements.
7. Web site is officially launched.

Does Ballyhoo build e-commerce sites?

Yes. All of our e-commerce sites or other database-driven are capable of handling thousands of items all through an user friendly interface.

Where is Ballyhoo located?

Ballyhoo is located in Aalst, 20 minutes close to Brussels and Ghent / Belgium; in the ‘Krooncenter’, with parking space (‘Kroonparking’) next to it. (Parking costs 0,5 € / half an hour.Here you can find the street map.

I want to sell my products online. What are the pros and cons?

With sales on the Internet increasing at an incredible rate, it seems that everyone wants to sell something on it. The ‘pros’ are pretty obvious. However, there are potential ‘cons’ to having an e-commerce site built.
Pros:
1. E-commerce sites can be build tailor-made these days and can be perfectly implemented in your web site.
2. More and more people are embracing ordering on the Internet.
3. You don't need a real shop or gallery anymore to show and sell your products or works to a large audience.
4. You don't need to hire any salespersons.
5. You can easily and fast change the price and all other content about your products online.
Cons:
1. Many people still prefer to see some products in person before they make a purchasing decision. In order to show more expensive products in the best possible way, it’s important to take multiple pictures of the product and to show the product from various angles. Photographing products from various angles, having a professional do this, and having a Web design utilize all the necessary technologies to show products in their very best light can be quite expensive.
2. The development of a dynamic e-commerce system, requires the hiring of specialists. This means: more expensive. But at the other hand, the web sites that we build, have an easy to use administrative section to update the products in the web site. You do not need to have someone on staff who has graphics or technical experience.
3. Although it is not always necessary to have a database driven web site! And in this case, we can update your content for you and charge a price/hour.

Why should you hire Ballyhoo?

1. We have been in web design business for 9 years.
2. We are not afraid to speak our minds and make recommendations about your content, that will give you a superior product.
3. We have experts in all phases of web design (Flash, graphic design, PHP and MySql, Asp.net).
4. We are pioneers in creating animation in Flash.
5. We can create a solution for any challenge that you present to us.
6. We create unique designs, you won’t find anywhere else.
7. We are easy to work with.

Communication.

An important time-consuming part of the project is getting feedback from you, the customer. As each phase of a project is completed, work is placed on-line for you to review. This is when it’s up to the you to tell us whether we got something right or need to make changes. This dialogue can go back forth on each phase quite a few times. If the customer does not make himself / herself readily available to discuss the work, the project can come to a grinding halt. This is why we always ask the client to appoint a contact person who will be responsible for making decisions or communicating the decisions to us. If the person that is chosen cannot make adequate time to review work and give us feedback, a project will go past the anticipated completion date.

What’s the first step in hiring Ballyhoo?

Talk to us.

Intellectual Property Rights © 1997 BALLYHOO.

You accept and recognize that the web site of BALLYHOO contains photographs, images, drawings, texts, information and other material, which is protected as intellectual property rights of BALLYHOO. A user, you receive from BALLYHOO a non-exclusive right to use the de web site for personal aims. This means that you can examine the web site, take knowledge of this information, use it within the framework of the services which are offered on the BALLYHOO web site, reproduce and use it in a normal way. Any allowed use of information means that the source of the information is always mentioned in a visible an clear manner, with a direct link to the concerning webpage. Subject to what is mentioned above, it is not permitted to partially or whole copy (on any manner), adapt, translate, sell, let, to notify to public without the explicit written and preceding authorization of BALLYHOO.