AMEX now accepted!

We have a new way for you to pay your bills without going through Paypal. As our company grows, we felt the need to get a better system set up with more flexibility & security, as well as faster processing for us as well.

Using a local company by the name of Beanstream, we’ve integrated our services into their API in order to facilitate the payments. We can now accept American Express cards as well as JCB cards in Canadian funds (Paypal had a restriction on this so we could only accept such cards in US currencies), and we can also easily set up recurring billing cycles for monthly or annual subscription services you have with us.

Payment methods accepted by our new gateway are:

• VISA
• MasterCard
• AmericanExpress
• JCB Cards

And of course we still accept the traditional payment methods such as:

• Cash
• Cheques
• Money Orders

We can also accept Interac Email Money Transfers through your approved Canadian financial organization!

Brixwork for Realtors, which is a product developed & offered by Sonika Studios Inc., also accepts this same payment mechanism for your convenience.

To pay using our new payment gateway, please visit our Contact Us page and scroll down to the green “Pay Now” button – and the rest is easy!

#705 – 1221 Homer Street
Vancouver, BC. V6B 1C5

Our new location on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

This week we are moving all of our office equipment & furniture, so we will not be able to start any new contracts or big jobs. However ongoing maintenance and light amounts of work, bug fixes will still be happening. Please be sure to update our address in your record books, as well as with your accountants, in order to prevent an interruption in delivering material & cheques. We will maintain a connection with the property owner in order to continuously have the mail forwarded, but this can last only so long! To avoid any potential late payment charges (2% per month) please ensure your records are up-to-date.

The Red Biscuit Theme

Some of you may know that Sonika Studios Inc. is the creator of the Brixwork semi-custom CMS. Our first standard distribution of Brixwork is in the form of Brixwork for Realtors – a fantastic website management system for the best realtor websites. Currently all of our clients are on front-ends that are fully custom designed. However we are in preparation to offer an alternative – a template-based monthly-subscription service to Brixwork for Realtors will allow more realtors at all budgets to have access to our services.

Some of our new themes being designed are:

• Greywood (our first master theme, consisting of classic wood textures and green)
• Red Biscuit (a contemporary & modern theme with a splash of colour)
• Classy Glass (incorporating beautiful glass tones and an open design – coming soon!)
• The Boss (classic black & leather texture for the upscale – coming soon!)

Brixwork for Realtors allows realtors to manage their websites with ease, while focusing heavily on a beautiful user interface & design, along with a well-composed and consistent content delivery scheme.

When Is This Happening?

The new rates kick in as of October 1st, 2010. I know, it’s a rather sudden notice, but this increase is deferred to many of our current clients as an exemption based on the contracts. Please scroll down below if you want to see the list of exemptions.

Here are the list of rate changes:

• Our standard labour rate for all design, creative processes, development, management etc. will be increased to $75/hr as of October 1st, unless you quality for an exemption.
• Our web hosting fee on our private server (which is a stellar server by the way) will be increased to $9/mth as of your next billing cycle, and billed yearly.
• Our Reach Email Marketing subscription fee will be increased to $22/mth as of your next billing cycle, and billed every 6 months.

Justifying the increase of our labour costs

Some of you may be thinking that a a 25% jump in rates is rather too steep, but here are a few explanations:

• Our productivity per hour has been increasing so much over the past few years. We can roll out the same products with less hours overall. On some web projects, we have seen productivity increases as much as 45%. So really, we’re not charging you more – we’re doing more work in the same amount of time, for a higher cost.
• Our rate is still among the lowest of agency rates. Please check out this link that explains the average cost of web design agencies (http://www.webdesignbroker.com/average-web-design-prices-what-should-a-website-cost/). So at $75/hr, we are still at the very bottom of the scale. We are not a big agency with big overheads, so we won’t charge the premium $150/hr like some of our competitors. At least not yet!
• With the advancement of non-flash techniques (jQuery, CSS3 etc.) websites are becoming less labour intensive. Many of our websites are taking less time than before due to this factor, but with increased quality.
• We have added some equipment to our office to better serve you. This includes a full Pantone Swatch Set, 2 new computers (iMac, Samsung Netbook), printer equipment, external storage space for backing up your files, and more. We take good care of our data.
• We have added security in our office thanks to Scott Security, as well as other measures of our own to protect your data.
• Our quality of work has increased so significantly over the years, with added experience and knowledge, as well as following the fast-paced trend changes.

The exemptions to this increase on labour cost

Just like anything else, there are some exemptions to this rate increase, and here they are:

• If you already have an active website contract with us, we won’t raise the rates in the middle of the job.. obviously.
• If you have a proposal that we have sent you within the month of September 2010, the $60/hr rate is valid as long as the proposal is accepted and the deposit is paid by the end of the week.
• If you have signed our contract (the thick bundle of papers with many legal terms), there will be a clause in there that guarantees your rate for a certain period of time, whether it be 3 months, 6 months, or a year. This is a warranty period rate freeze, so this rate increase will be deferred for that specific project until the freeze period is over.
• If you qualify for a volume discount based on high monthly volume (10 hours or more a month on average, ongoing), we will be sending you separate emails with specific terms for your account.

Regarding the subscription rate changes

This is really simply due to increasing costs of maintenance and software licensing. A trickle-down of the inflation that has been hitting our society for over a hundred years, if you may.

The advantages of using our Reach system, as well as hosting your site on our server rather than going with a 3rd party web hosting provider, are that we take personalized care of all your data and information, and we are able to provide personalized and direct service for you. Also, by having your site on our servers, we can expect less unexpected errors regarding server environments. This saves our time, and your money, in the long run.

Questions & Concerns?

Please feel free to email us with any questions about your rates. For the sake of privacy, we will not be allowing comments on this specific blog post.

Our new website

This is the second website we’ve built for Sonika Studios Inc. and this one is a big  improvement from the last one. We’ve trimmed out the long text, simplified it, and made it more about the visuals and our clientele – after all that’s what really tells you what we’re capable of, and what we can offer you.

Key features of our new site:

• jQuery – we eliminated all needs for flash animation by using advanced jQuery animation. This ensures that our site looks and works gorgeously on all platforms, including the iPad and iPhone and all computers.
• Bigger photos – our portfolio items and artwork are displayed in much larger visuals.
• Social Media – we’ve incorporated some of the most advanced social media integration methods for Facebook & Twitter integration.

We would like to extend our thanks to all of our clients, both newer and older (and future ones) for growing with us in the past 5 years.

You can find us on Facebook at our company page, and also follow us on Twitter through @sonikastudios.

We will bring a fresh new vibe to the industry. Out with the old designs with too much clutter, lines, and boxes. In with our new designs that are clean, simple, elegant, user-friendly, and never gets old! Blend this with amazing functionality and cross-browser friendliness, and we can provide you with an excellent solution for your realtor websites.

Brixwork for Realtors features:

• Unlimited listings, and photos (as much as your web hosting account can physically hold!)
• An affordable monthly rate of $50 (plus applicable taxes)
• Easy to use listing updating system with tabs for easy navigation
• Built-in image cropper for precise thumbnail cutting
• AJAX-based user interface means faster, more intuitive navigation and control
• Video tour, PDF feature sheet, Floorplans uploadable
• Built-in Google Maps for showing the precise location of the listing, as well as streetview, and driving directions

By March, we will be offering free trials of the websites to feature our beautiful templates. Below are some screenshots of the back-end that our clients will enjoy.

Brixwork Product List

Brixwork Edit Window

#1701 – 388 Drake Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 6A8

Our office is slightly larger as the new suite’s renovation has removed some of the dividing walls. We will resume regular service by Tuesday December 1st after the move work and cleaning is all done. Thank you for your patience and support.

While I will be checking my emails for urgent material, and putting some time in throughout the week, there will be some slow-down to the services.

The following services will be COMPLETELY STOPPED during this week:

• Paper/Magazine ad designs (if you need something due this week, please let me know by the Saturday, which is September 19th)
• Any type of heavy development for websites
• Content management on websites
• New logos, business cards, or anything that requires lots of creativity and brain juice (I’ll be fed nothing but cold pudding for a few days)
• Phone consultations and tutorials (naturally after I have my tonsils pulled, I’d like to speak as little as possible)

If we are currently developing a website for you, I will have some HTML/CSS work continue during that week through Tanya (tanya@sonikastudios.com), so that work can continue. Any Flash Animation work will still be handled by Franco (franco@sonikastudios.com). Any minor updates on existing sites can also be handled through Tanya and Franco, depending on the nature of work.

If you need something done around that time urgently, please contact us now.

Thank you for your understanding, and I will be back at near-full force on September 28th, Monday (after I eat the largest and heaviest meal I can imagine).

- Jeff Kee, CEO of Sonika Studios Inc.

Here’s how you can win:

A. If you create a blog post on your own blog (doesn’t have to be WordPress), with a link back to this post with the handle “Vancouver Web Design Agency Sonika Studios Inc. at the WordCamp Fraser Valley” within the <a> tag, we will award you 3 entries.

B. If you tweet “@sonikastudios is presenting at the @wcfv this Saturday on WordPress for total web CMS. Win a free pass to the event at http://bit.ly/UdiDM”, we will award you 1 entry.

The contest will close at 6pm Friday (August 21st 2009).

Of course, Sonika Studios Inc. is an industry leader when it comes to applying WordPress as a CMS in order to deliver self-managed websites to clients who want them, and you can read more about how we use WordPress as a CMS here. WordPress and its plugins allow an excellent user experience for the business owner, without the headache of learning the vast complexities of other off-the-shelf CMS solutions such as Joomla or Drupal.

As a lighter alternative to our own semi-custom developed CMS platform, Brixwork, a professionally modified edition of WordPress can deliver you the results you need for a simple yet powerful CMS. Of course, if you want full-strength and a lot of custom development options, our Brixwork platform is your answer, but more than half of our website clients can sufficiently manage their sites with a WordPress system, so you could be one of them!

Wordcamp Fraser Valley is being held on August 22nd, between 9AM to 5PM, at the Surrey SFU campus. It’s near the Surrey Central Skytrain station, so either drive down, or hop on the Skytrain to get there! Tickets and other details can be found at the Wordcamp Fraser Valley Site.