Integrity
Our Most Precious Possession is Our Good Name
We take our integrity very seriously, and our policies and ethics are designed to protect our customers as much as they protect us.
No incentives/no kickbacks policy
Equentity LLC does not accept incentives or kickbacks from any third party vendors. This allows us to freely recommend the best alternatives for our customers without any personal motivation for gain. This is very important when we perform graphic design work, which requires printing houses to deliver the end product. It can also apply to outside hosting companies, other vendors and online payment processors.
Prorated charging
We prorate our time in five minute increments. We will never charge for an hour of work when we've only spent five minutes completing a task for a customer. We believe it is dishonest to operate in any other fashion.
No markup
We do not mark up other people's work done on behalf of our customers. If we partner with another person or company to fulfill a portion of a contract or a customer wishes to use an outside agency for any part of a project, we do not charge any additional costs on top of those billed by the partner. This also ties into our philosophy that charging for work we have not done is dishonest.
Rights and ownership
Unlike many design companies, upon payment, our customers own all of the work we do for them. They have full access to all source files and code we produce and are free to do with it as they see fit (note: most custom and prepackaged scripts will only be licensed for single site use - this may be negotiable). We are often asked to perform site maintenance, as most customers are very happy with our pricing policies. However, there are no future obligations to utilize our services and we will never attempt to exercise any control on purchased work outside of that granted by the customer.
Quality standards
We preach efficiency and sound coding practices to our customers and other industry professionals, and our results are testaments to the importance of doing thorough, detailed work. We hand-code everything from scratch as opposed to using second-rate development programs, such as FrontPage, GoLive or Dreamweaver. At best, they produce inefficient results. At worst, the product they create can be downright unusable for significant portions of the Web viewing audience. Cleaning up after some other program's mistakes does not sound like a smart design practice to us, and the bottom line is there is no substitute for doing things right the first time.
Quotes v. Estimates
We do not give our customers estimates at the beginning of a project. We give them quotes. An estimate is a ballpark figure that gives the customer a rough idea of how much a project will cost. A quote is the maximum amount our customers can possibly be charged for the work we intend to perform for them. There are some extraordinarily remote circumstances under which a quote may need to be modified. These are detailed in our terms of service, and have never once been an issue in any project we've done.
