Design Partners

At Matrix Digital Media, we enjoy productive and ongoing relationships with a number of freelance graphic designers, design firms, advertising agencies and marketing firms. We are proud to bring value to our partners businesses and to their clients.

These collaborative relationships tend to take on a variety of forms, but they all value the way we approach our relationship:

• Win-win Relationships. We make money only of our customers are successful. We use the word “partners” intentionally because that’s how we think of ourselves with our design-firm customers. Successful websites do what their clients need plus allow our partners to earn a profit.
• Transparent or Hidden. We don’t care if our partners tell their clients about our role in the projects. With some relationships, our role is completely transparent to their customers and we even participate in planning sessions. In other relationships, we’re a hidden part of our partners’ operations. Either works for us.
• Fixed Pricing. We are willing to provide fixed based pricing on a close-but-not-perfect understanding of scope. We know our customers are usually including our costs (as a subcontractor) within a proposal to their customers. We know that if we charge for things they can’t charge for, our partners get hurt.
• Affordable Rates. With an ongoing relationship, we give our design partners a modest discount to our normal hourly rate. We do this to allow our partners the opportunity to mark-up our rates and remain competitive against competitors. This also works for us because we’re not responsible for managing the client. Once again, win-win.
• Clear Communication Around Scope Change. Change of scope (i.e. increasing costs mid-project) is not easy in a direct relationship. Despite the best planning efforts, the client can still make changes that are clearly out of scope for what was quoted. We understand that for managing their client relationship, we need to assist our partners by being extremely clear and prompt with communication regarding change of scope. 
• Consulting Support. Many of our design partners often need technical support on preparing files, brainstorming about possible technical solutions or otherwise need coaching on how to approach a web project. We view this as part of our job and is a value to our partners.
• Customer Service. Instead of working with a commodity host or an overseas programming firm, our design partners value the fact that we’re all here in Philomath, Oregon. We’re real people who answer the phone, can participate in in-person meetings if needed and are here to help them take care of their customers.

Process & Requirements

Our design partners use us in a number of ways and we work from different types of working files. Here are a few examples:

• HTML Files. Some design partners provide us with fully packaged (or nearly so) HTML files. We might simply be asked to host the website and manage email.
• HTML Plus Additional Programming. Some projects are delivered to us as basic (static) HTML pages and we build other, dynamic sections of the website based on the templates they have created.
• Photoshop & MS Word Documents. Other projects are delivered to us as layered Photoshop files (for the look and feel) with accompanying MS Word documents containing text and sitemap descriptions. From these files, we program the entire site.

Whatever your skills or desired process, we can work to turn your designs into working, functional websites at a fixed cost. To understand our expertise and experience, visit our services pages: