BC Partner Interview - Sumiyo Amano of Designtech Studio

Brent: Hey. This is Brent from BC Gurus and HotPress Web. I'm here with Sumiyo from Designtech. We're up in Lyons, Colorado at her home office. We've been chatting about Business Catalyst for the last hour or so and just business in general. I think you've gotten some really good exposure with Adobe. I think it's going to be really cool for some partners to learn a little bit more about you and who Designtech is. If you don't mind just telling us a little bit about who Designtech is. Who is Sumiyo?

Sumiyo: Hi everybody. I'm Sumiyo Amano. I'm Designtech Studio. I usually do about 95% of the work of Designtech Studio. I have been doing work since 2001. I incorporated the company in 2001. I have been doing design and web work since about 1997.

Brent: Wow.

Sumiyo: Started out small and started to grow into doing a lot of Flash work, and then doing CSS work and now into BC.

Brent: Very nice. I think your sites are featured front and center on Adobe. If you haven't checked out the work by Designtech, I think it's inspiring to other partners to learn how to design like you. I'm curious how you learned how to design. Did you have formal training? Is it something that you're just passionate about?

Sumiyo: My father gave me his camera when I was really young. So I started doing a lot of photo shoots around town. Then when I traveled, I took pictures. My mom thought that I did pretty well, so I developed on that. I went to Arts High School, a publicly funded school that was for artists. That really got me to stay in the art field for a while. Then got into Photoshop and editing my photographs and into video and multimedia work. I was telling you that I did CD-ROM work in Director and Shockwave and Flash, and now into Web.

Brent: You've been through the whole Adobe product suite.

Sumiyo: Yes, I have.

Brent: It's nice that your back end system is now powered by Adobe. Just starting to get into the Business Catalyst conversation, you were designing websites before you ever used BC. Did you used to do all of the back end coding?

Sumiyo: No. I had developers that I worked with. They would do the back end and do a lot of the database and programming. Then I would get the data through either XML or some type of format. Then I would display it in a user interface. My focus has been user interface, creating the interface that works really well.

Brent: I'm curious on the UI side. Are you just born with it? How do you figure out what the users want and know what's going to be easy for them?

Sumiyo: Well, I know that I want to create a site that works well for me too. I'm a user as well. As long as it functions well and I don't have any hiccups as I'm going through each step in the interface, then I feel like, okay, this is something that would work. I would have other people test it out too. Being more redundant in the user interface is better than stripping it out to a small amount that may only serve a small amount of people that function that way. Not just visually, but with words and experience, you want to showcase your interface in multiple different ways to get to the same content.

Brent: Interesting.

Sumiyo: Just years probably of doing a lot of interface.

Brent: Got you. How did you find Business Catalyst?

Sumiyo: I was on the FreelanceSwitch website in 2008. They had an advertisement on the right-hand side, that I never click on usually, but I clicked on that one for some reason.

Brent: Adobe the advertiser, Business Catalyst at the time, it worked.

Sumiyo: It worked!

Brent: Keep spending money.

Sumiyo: I clicked on that square advertisement and got to the BC site and I was just floored. I wanted to be able to create a site that was community development, had a lot of features that could bring people together and have conversation on the site like a forum, a lot of blogs and commenting all in one place. This definitely served the purpose. I was hooked right away.

Brent: You had used other systems before. A lot of web designers or people in this industry have used several different systems. It seems like what you mostly are passionate about now is BC. What was different between whatever you used before and BC?

Sumiyo: I was doing a lot of custom work. Everything was custom. Every project had its own custom CMS in the past. That got really, really tricky for upgrading and things. Then I went on to exploring Drupal a little bit more. Because I don't have the PHP programming background, I had to hire somebody else. It just became hard to get the projects done. Also, I did dabble into WordPress as well. I really wanted something that had all of the pieces together that I don't have to upgrade individual pieces and then try and fix things all the time and spending a lot of time and money on support and upgrades. It seemed like BC was a really good way to jump in. Even within their all-in-one products, it's not one piece is great but it services everything that you need. You can customize on top of that. I really like that flexibility of BC.

Brent: I'm interested to hear how your customers have taken it. You've definitely had some projects featured with Adobe. It seems like you've gotten some results. How have your customers reacted to the product?

Sumiyo: It all depends on the client. Sometimes they're tech savvy and sometimes they're not. They're too busy. Sometimes they want to have control over their content and their product line. It all depends. Sometimes they come to me and they want to still have me update some small things. I'm willing to do that, but I'm all about training them. As much as I can train them, through either online training or screen share or over the phone, I put that amount of time into the proposal. I make sure that their tech savviness is communicated in the beginning so I know how much time I have to spend. It usually works out really well. Sometimes they're really busy and they just don't have the time that one season or that month. Then they'll send me content to do. I'm okay with that.

Brent: How do you work your ongoing work with a client? Are you all about the initial project and then that's that? Or do you build in some recurring services to them?

Sumiyo: Mm-hmm. Sometimes we can do a monthly management fee. Sometimes it's hourly, depending on their workload and what they need. If it's a feature upgrade, we'll do a totally new proposal and come up with a project of cost estimate. Otherwise, hourly. It depends in a way.

Brent: Each one's different.

Sumiyo: It feels that way. I like to go more toward not a package deal, but more of a standardized thing that would work. It's going there.

Brent: I've always found customers like to have stuff tailored to them, but they also like to have options. They like to see stuff. It's hard to invest time in creating those options if you're not actually going to sell them just like they are. What have you found that's maybe frustrated you about Business Catalyst? What could you tell other partners to look out for or to not do those types of projects? Did you ever sell the wrong project on BC or something like that?

Sumiyo: I think knowing the BC platform really well also helps to sell the product and expectations. Just because you know that there's a booking module, that doesn't mean that it's going to have all of the features that the client is imagining in their mind. You want to make sure that the booking module is there, but how does it show up on the calendar? How can they interact and what's the limitation? All those things really help in keeping the expectations and then coming up with new ideas that could integrate with the BC as is. Right now, you might have to look elsewhere on some features and integrate it as much as you can or use it to the fullest capabilities. You've got to know what the limitations are.

Brent: It's interesting. Probably by the time I air this video, the post about quick prototyping from Phil Lockwood will be out there. It's done today. I'll probably link it in this post as well. I think something with Business Catalyst that you can do, because it's so quick to build out the sites without doing the design and all that kind of stuff, instead of going in and wire framing stuff out, sometimes you can just jump in there. If your client is like, "I want to do a booking. I want to have people register for events," you can actually create an account and within a few minutes you can add the booking module to the page. You can add a forum. You can add payment processing. You can tell the client, "Is this what you're talking about?" Really get them to use it and see. That's hard when you start fighting with people's imaginations. They hear "event booking" and they just think oh, well it must do everything with events. That's usually not the case.

Sumiyo: Exactly. Like you were mentioning about the SimpleCRM, that's a company that would really focus on CRM and they do it so well. BC has a CRM but that's not their only feature. You're going to be lacking some features there in e-commerce and all those things. But as long as you know.

Brent: You definitely have to set those expectations. Have you found anything that you were able to do very successfully on BC? A tip or a trick, something that you've delivered to a client and they've just been ecstatic about.

Sumiyo: I think the content management system is definitely something that they just love. Just keeping the design and templates really clean and having the pages really simple so they don't have to get around the design parts of the page at all. They just go in and change it right away. They can do InContext Editing. All those things people just love.

Brent: You mentioned InContext Editing. I think it's important that when you do go through a BC project that you make sure the InContext works correctly and is set up. For us, they came out with InContext and we had a lot of sites that we had already built. This really nice feature came out and it was great, but with a lot of our previous clients, we hadn't set those templates up in a way that was friendly with InContext. In order to avoid a frustrated client, just going through those and checking off, hey, this site works with InContext, I think, is important. Very cool. We definitely appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.

Sumiyo: Sure. No problem.

Brent: You guys should definitely follow Designtech's work. Are you on social media? Are you out there doing stuff? Is it like go to your website, see your work, and that's it?

Sumiyo: I was involved but not much now. Come and see my site.

Brent: We'll definitely create a link to Designtech. We appreciate you guys tuning in today for BC Gurus. Stay tuned for more content. See you.

Sumiyo: See you later.