Frequently Asked Questions

We work with a wide range of local, national and international business types. Individual projects, small businesses and start-ups, large corporate entities, non-profits and charitable organizations, B2B, B2C and more] across several business industries [industrial/trades, technology, restaurants and food service, clothing/apparel, health and beauty, travel, finance, legal, arts, fair trade, music, and more].

Our team takes the time to research and understand your business climate, organization, industry, and your competition to ensure the finished product supports all of your goals.

The costs associated with our services vary greatly depending on the nature of the service itself, the planning and consultation required, the complexity of the desired end result, and of course the production requirements themselves. Clients are provided with a very accurate price estimate o a per-project basis, which includes a break-down of the project time and the production or completion costs. If a project requires less than 1 hour of time, we bill at our regular design rateRegular Design Rate: $80 or our development rateRegular Development Rate: $100/hr or our off-hours or emergency rates as applicable. Additional rates and pricing information can be found in our price list.

Primary methods of payment we accept include Visa, Mastercard, Cash, Company Cheque, Bank Draft, Money Order, Direct Bank Transfer, Interac e-Transfer, and Trade. That’s right, Alchemy Imageworks is a B2B business that still accepts proposals involving trade for goods or services. For more information please refer to our page on Trade Proposals.

In the majority of website development, graphic design or marketing cases an in-person meeting is not necessary and most of our websites are generally completed through ongoing electronic communication. Email, Skype, WeChat, Splashtop, Teamviewer and telephone are all utilized on a regular basis to communicate with our international clientele, and we’re almost always able to accommodate additional electronic meeting methods where required. We also utilize shared document and cloud storage platforms such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and place any sensitive or proprietary work as well as live preliminary materials online via our secure testing server for you to view development work in progress.

No matter what product, service or idea your business is selling, you can almost be certain that your prospective customers will search online to learn about what you are offering. The level of professionalism in your company’s online presence, the strength of your branding and imagery, and the experience and intelligence behind your marketing strategy all play a pivotal role in online and offline success.  If your business cannot be found, then your competitors that can will be taking a lion’s share of the opportunities and customer conversions. With over 80% of all transactions beginning from an online search, usually in Google, and it’s almost impossible to ignore the importance of a strong impact online right out of the gate or how vital it is to maintain and nurture momentum once it has been gained.

We adhere to the absolute highest customer service standards, so you can expect consistent, dependable communication between us and your team.

And for increased peace of mind, our professional team also commits to a general one-hour maximum communication response rate. This means we will always acknowledge that your question, concern or feedback was received by our team within a one-hour period – at which time we will indicate when we are best able to report back to you with an answer to your inquiry.

Although you are never limited to working with a specific agency, we do recommend it. In the case of Alchemy Imageworks, we save our clients a wealth of time and money by offering what standard design and development houses can’t; a complete 360-degree array of digital design, development, online marketing and I.T. services for businesses of all sizes. Instead of hiring multiple subcontractors, each focused solely on a specific niche without understanding the symbiosis required between design, development, marketing and information technology to not only fully support a growing business as a single function, but to help our clients and their businesses thrive. One stop, certified professionals, fair pricing, and an award-winning support group that genuinely cares about your company, your time and your bottom line.

The type of results and the time to see results are going to vary based on (1) the services you are using and (2) the budget and timelines attached to the project. However, if you have a very specific marketing, graphic design or custom website development goal, then certain services may provide results faster than others. For example: Pay-Per-Click (PPC Advertising) can be set up and delivering traffic to your website within hours of setup, whereas quality search engine optimization and social media management services, can involve much more complicated set ups and often do take weeks, or even months, before any direct results are noticed.

Yes, to an extent. We provide up to an hour of training included with every website development project to help familiarize you or your chosen staff with the operation of the administrative panel for your new CMS website, and how to apply minor edits to text, images and other content. How to create and disable pages, etc. Content Management Systems can be relatively easy to use once properly set up, and a great deal of information regarding the operation and editing of your CMS website design is available online in the form of YouTube videos and tutorial websites. WordPress, our primary CMS is also open source and a vast amount of online training in all aspects of it’s use and customization is available online. Should you or your staff require extended training in WordPress websites, www.lynda.com and www.udemy.com provide some very thorough training courses covering nearly every aspect of its use.

This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer, since so many factors are involved in determining the price. Our project minimum is $500CAD for a single page custom HTML website, but website development can range into thousands, or even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for large scale enterprise websites. Pricing will largely depend on three major factors; level of project and asset preparedness prior to commencement of website development, size of the website (how much content is there, how many pages?), and feature set. For a simple website design in a lower price range the requirements may be simple and the message conveyed in a single page, but larger websites may require forms, password-protected areas, subscriber services, complex analytics, animation, customer interactivity and other features that may require extended planning and website development time. The more time spent pre-planning a website design project, the less costly the estimate, and the result.

It is highly recommended that potential clients come to the table very prepared, since ultimately it will save them a great deal of time and money. We can help provide a strategy on how best to prepare for your website development project in advance of development to make it a smooth and efficient process. Give us a call at 1-855-571-2200 to get started.

We are incredibly savvy at helping small businesses and start-ups succeed. Options exist and we can help you find them. Customization of a pre-built template is an option for budgets not accommodating full-scale website development many small business consider. Generally, we don’t recommend the use of website templates, but they may be quite appropriate in specific situations where construction and launch of a website needs to occur within a relatively short amount of time, or if the project has an extremely limited budget, a template might be an acceptable short-term solution. Some things to note when considering a pre-built template option for your website development project:

1. Despite indicated ratings for things like ‘user-friendliness’, browser compatibility, mobile responsiveness and user reviews, many web templates can be incredible complex and difficult to customize to the desired result. Many also require third-party vendor plugins or modifications whose licensing and/or support sometimes falls outside the support or licensing of the template itself. That same support can also disappear without a moments’ notice if the company responsible for said plugin decides to provide limited subsequent updates or releases, or decides to drop the product completely.
2. Most pre-built website templates do not easily conform to important user interface/user experience (UI/UIX), or search engine guidelines. If your website is not specifically designed and developed to meet the exacting needs of your users, or if the search engines can’t easily index the content on your website, then the project, and your pocketbook, will never see its full potential.
3. Most website templates do not lend themselves to quick or easy modification. If you require design, layout or operational modifications, it’s important to understand that trying to implement these changes after development can substantially increase the total cost of the website. In some cases, requests for significant or complex changes may be extremely difficult or almost impossible to accommodate due to budgetary considerations or template architectural restrictions.
4. Website templates acquired from online vendors will likely also have been used by hundreds or thousands of other individuals or companies, possibly even by your own competition. A cookie-cutter website template doesn’t attract much lasting attention and overall marketability is significantly reduced. Great website design and development begins with the audience in mind, and is a direct reflection of your brand and your business.

Many of our clients specifically request WordPress website development, and it is an often-suggested architecture with far-reaching capabilities. WordPress certainly started with humble beginnings as a blogging website package, but it has since grown into a full Content Management System (CMS) that is used by professional agencies and individuals around the world for creating websites of almost any size. At the time of this writing, over 50 million people have chosen WordPress to power their website development project. Highly-notable users of WordPress websites include TechCrunch, The New Yorker, Snoop Dogg, Usain Bolt, Bloomberg Professional, Sony Music, Time Inc., Microsoft News Center, Mashable, The Rolling Stones, Bata, The Walking Dead, Mercedes Benz and The Walt Disney Company.

Interested in learning more about some of the incredibly powerful advantages of working with WordPress? Check out all the information at www.wordpress.org.

Great question! Unlike many web design firms who farm work out to freelancers or inexperienced interns, we communicate. Some web design companies provide little or no access when a client wants to speak directly with their designers or developers. We encourage open and direct communications and our clients work directly with our friendly and professional team-members as much or as little as they require for an entirely interactive and customized website development experience that always leads to much more precise results. Who the specific team members are will entirely depend on the individual project needs, but our entire team provides input on every project, just to be sure we don’t hit unnecessary pitfalls or miss opportunities for our clients’ projects to excel even further in the process.

You sure do! We provide a complete backup of all relevant files and assets and deliver them to you electronically when the website development project is agreed upon as complete, and the final payment on contract is made. Most of our clients stay with us for the life of the website, but if for any reason you decide you want to move your website to a different hosting service or get another company to service the site, we will happily assist you in making the transition as effortlessly and efficiently as possible.

We specialize in HTML5/XHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP, but are considerably experienced with Flash, DHTML, XML, PHP, and several others. Although extremely unlikely, if there’s something we can’t accomplish with our in-house team, we maintain an extended support network of very skilled local professionals in all applicable fields of interest.

We sure do! For single/one-time website changes, clients can either call or send us an email with the request and necessary assets. We will assess the work involved and provide an estimate before beginning work, based on our standard hourly development rateHourly Development Rate: $100. If you anticipate regular ongoing maintenance, one of our extended Service Plans may be more cost-effective solution for you. We also complete emergency and off-hour edits for clients at variable rates. Please see our price list for more information.

Give us a call at 1-855-571-2200 (or 780-571-2200 local Edmonton, Alberta), or contact us using the form here to get started on your website. We will provide a free website design estimate based on our initial communication or we arrange a follow-up meeting if gathering additional details require a more in-person assessment (please note: we have team members available to travel globally for client meetings where requested and appropriate cost considerations are confirmed in advance as covered by client). Once an estimate has been agreed upon, 50% of any logo design project is paid by the client. The project is then booked for research and planning with selected members of our team most suited to the project, then components of design and development are assigned and production commences.

Alchemy Imageworks’ offers a variety of options for maintaining and refreshing your site content. We understand that not every individual or business has the budget to support ongoing changes and updates to a website, but we strongly encourage you to update your website on a regular basis. Ongoing updates provide better search engine results, thus increasing exposure while reducing overall ongoing organic SEO and PPC advertising costs. The addition of new content or even changes to existing content will also generally encourage the intended audience to return to the website repeatedly with the understanding that new and updated information can usually (or always) be found there.

The Pay as You Go Plan: Give us a call (1-855-571-2200) when you need to add content to your website or require changes, or send your request by email here. We’ll complete your request within 48 hours of confirmation, and we invoice at our standard hourly rate (variable according to service). Urgent, emergency, and off-hours website edits or website development requests can usually be completed within a few hours for an additional charge. Please see our price list for base rates and details.

Extended Service Plans: Purchase one of our extremely flexible service plans, and you’ll receive a significant discount on our standard rates in addition to a block of variable service hours that can be applied to a wide variety of Alchemy Imageworks services, and banked for extended time-periods or carried over when not used or when added to. An excellent way to save money and gain peace-of-mind.

We get asked this quite a bit, as you can imagine. There are too many variables to narrow down a fixed cost but many of our standard simple-to-medium-complexity projects typically fall between $500-$1400. We take great pride in applying a serious degree of market and competition research during our logo design process to ensure the finished product is original, incredibly competitive in a specific clients’ niche, and stands out from the crowd while capturing the clients vision perfectly. The level of detail provided for a logo design project during the initial meeting, as well as the level of client-side involvement and communication throughout the design and brand development process can also increase costs due to the additional time involved in meetings, feedback, edits and review processes.

That being said; our team is experienced, and we’re very efficient. So, while we have a fondness for research and preparation where logo design is concerned, our team is also very capable of crafting some seriously professional, unique and visually awe-inspiring designs in a shorter timespan for projects where required. We understand that some entrepreneurs have visions and products they need realized digitally, quickly, so that they can capture the vision for their intended audience while certain markets are hot or exact timing required, so if you need graphics or project branding completed ‘on-demand’, give us a call. There is an excellent chance our enthusiastic team of digital alchemists will work late or on weekends to accomplish what you need in the time you need it completed. We love what we do, and we love doing a ton of it, so please don’t be shy about asking for on-demand service or inquiring for more information about our retainer rates for extended projects.

Check out our price list here  for base pricing details and overtime / off-hours rates for on-demand services.

The client has whatever level of involvement they choose; not involved in any part of the process until layout reviews begin, or involved every step of the way either by themselves or as part of a larger team, or somewhere in-between. Generally-speaking, our team likes to keep our clients fully involved in the graphic design process to ensure an accurate finished product. In any case, clients are also asked to review and approve various drafts or the layout or graphic elements throughout the design process, so that they are always aware of the progress that is being made on the project. We encourage all of our clients to bring in any samples, colour preferences, swatches, and ideas they may have. Being entrepreneurs ourselves, we’re also incredibly adept at translating sketches on napkins.

Pricing for graphic design work depends on several variables, but you can always rest assured that you’ll be paying for high quality, original work. Our prices are competitive and fair based on the quality of our finished products. Interested potential customers can view some of our graphic design work, including business logo designs in our portfolio. We base our rates at our standard design rate multiplied by time spent, counted in 15-minute increments. If you have small changes to a pre-existing file that takes takes 5 minutes for a quick update, then we charge the minimum amount of $20, and we are extremely efficient. We can complete website edits and image updates quickly, as well as produce some incredibly original and highly-marketable finished products in rapid fashion thanks to the skill and experience of our graphic designers and digital artists.

Absolutely! We have an extensive portfolio of past graphic design work, including logo design and branding projects. Click here.

We only print a very specific type of high-end premium business card (see our Business Cards page here for details). All other printing requirements we are happy to arrange through a printer near to the client, or we can provide Vistaprint or other printer-specific output where the client has specified such a requirement.

The client owns full copyright of the graphics we create (including logo designs) once final payment on contract has been received. We do, however, reserve the right to use any of our work for promotional purposes and inclusion in our online and offline printed portfolios.

We provide professional graphic design and logo design services to hundreds of different companies from all over the globe including Europe, Australia, China, Russia and the United States. We have multilingual team-members with excellent customer service skills coupled with WeChat and some of the best active translation software on the planet. Don’t worry, it’s 2017; together we’ll find a way to communicate and realize your vision.

Give us a call at 1-855-571-2200 (or 780-571-2200 if you happen to be local to Edmonton, Alberta), or contact us using the form here  to get started. We will provide a free graphic design estimate based on our initial communication or arrange a follow-up meeting as you prefer. Once an estimate has been agreed upon, 50% of any graphic design project is paid by the client. The project is then booked for research with one of our marketing specialists prior to development (primarily in the case of logo design) and is then assigned to one of our Jedi-level graphic designers or multiple designers most suited to accomplish the desired result.

You will receive an AI (Adobe Illustrator vector), EPS (vector), PDF (vector), JPG, PNG (with transparency where applicable). Your finished logo design can be then used to complete stationery and additional brand marketing materials – including letterheads and envelopes design (corporate representation materials), brochure and flyer design, website layout design, graphics for web sites, presentation folders, and just about any other graphic design requirement your business may have.

When you’re trying to earn money for your business or earn investor interest in an idea, the thought of spending more money on a new brand, logo design, or branding strategy may not even cross your mind. But unless you’re inundated with new clients and phone calls from interested investors – it absolutely should. Technology and communication changes rapidly. Today’s internet audience is fickle, incredibly impatient and used to having choice, and lots of it. On average, people will give a website mere seconds of attention to prove it’s got what they’re looking for before giving up and searching somewhere else. If your intended audience isn’t attracted to your brand, can’t find what they’re looking for with relative ease, or if they simply lose patience or interest in your site, and BAM! – you’ve lost them to the competition. It is vital for that reason to develop and market a strong brand identity that represents your company, its products and services, and makes clear what you do.

Great question! Compatibility is very important. First, browse through our portfolio. Are there works there representative of the general style you’re after? Enlisting the efforts of a designer whose work matches the general aesthetic you’re aiming for is essential to achieving a comfortable design experience and accurate result. Our team is comprised of diversely-talented artists to accommodate a wide variety of styles, so even if you don’t see something reminiscent of your intended goal, it never hurts to call or meet with us.

Next, it’s a good idea to read over the testimonials from our previous clients, many of which can be found here. Some of the reviews we’ve been given accurately highlight our teams’ friendliness, attention to detail, extraordinary level of customer service, and unwavering commitment to a job well-done. We’ll give you our full attention, and we enjoy working with clients who are equally focused. After all, we’re here to make something amazing together, and have fun doing it.

We view it as extremely unfair for clients to have to return after a couple of years when their identity is out-of-date. The professional branding work we create is intended to last the duration of clients’ businesses, to impart an emotional connection with the audience, properly convey the intended message, and to be vividly memorable — not to look trendy or fit in with the latest status quo.

Absolutely not. No brand or business will ever benefit from an open submission approach to design as much as they will from sitting down with an intelligent and experienced graphic designer, discussing their needs, and working out a consistent strategy. Please understand that our time is valuable, and that our team has endured many years of effort and education to arrive at the level of expertise required to produce the world-class quality of work we do. Essentially, ‘spec work’ is asking for our team to donate time for your project, even if it is merely in the nature of a consultation. Deposit of 50% or more is required on contracts over $250, and payment plans are available on contracts whose totals exceed $4000. We’re flexible and competitively-priced, but generally we don’t work for free.

That being said, we are open to discussion with non-profits and charities regarding their particular brand identity requirements. Please contact us for more information.

Absolutely! Several of our clients are individuals with amazing ideas, start-ups and small businesses. In-fact, we specialize in using transmedia methodologies, marketing experience and an arsenal of digital skills to help ideas and businesses of all sizes with brand identity, logo design and establishing a solid, achievable strategy for nurturing that identity and maintaining positive momentum once it’s in the public eye. We also offer competitive rates, payment plans for approved individuals and businesses on contracts over $4000 and one of the most competitive and full-featured service plan sets in the country.

Yes. If you currently rely on a trusted print vendor and simply need print-ready files we can arrange for electronic or physical delivery of the necessary files. Optionally, when required, our team can manage the entire printing process for you, recommending vendors, obtaining quotes and seeing your project through to the finished printed materials and arranging pick-up and/or delivery to your location. In this case, we will add a small print management fee or travel fee to the project invoice as applicable.

Every project varies in length and complexity and so can only be accurately gauged on a case-by-case basis. As a rough guide, it’s best to allow 2-3 months for a new brand strategy or rebrand, and for brand identity design requiring ongoing strategy, projects generally take 4-6 months.

You bet. Our team of designers and marketing experts are some of the sharpest researchers on the internet, incredibly efficient, and highly-adept at drawing from their unlimited inner wells of creativity to rapidly realise a vision. It just costs more. Emergency and off-hour work requests are welcomed, but not all are accepted. We base the decision on our teams’ willingness to work the overtime necessary to meet the demands of near-impossible deadlines while still maintaining our commitment to thorough research and the application of brand strategy when developing an identity. We refuse to produce sub-standard work based on the pressure strain of a deadline on the creative process. If we can’t accomplish a world-class result worthy of our reputation by the deadline required, we won’t accept the contract.

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer for this question. There are many businesses with very limited marketing budgets that have since become highly successful brands, while on the other hand, there are thousands of examples where companies spent millions or billions of dollars to establish an identity, only to fall short of the mark.

Successful brands first establish a powerful identity and then build momentum by doing all of the things a business needs to do to. Continue marketing success once a strong foundation has been established. Any business, with any brand strategy still has a responsibility to the identity and to their audience to continue to provide the same exceptional service, or amazing products, and to promote cultivation of that same emotional connection that was established when the brand identity was first confirmed.

Brand identity projects involving strategy typically range from $40,000 to $120,000, the total scope of the work that is required being the most significant factor affecting the invoice. The time required for proper [experienced] research and the creation of any deliverables required can significantly increase the price. The landscape of competition for your business or project also contributes to the expense of building and maintaining a brand. While a business in a very specialized, highly-focused niche can be done for as little as a few thousand dollars.

One thing can be stated for certain; building a successful brand is not an overnight solution or quick-return investment. It takes a degree of expertise, discipline, tenacity, and time. The bottom line is that the branding process must be viewed as an investment — it’s the perception of your company.

Compared to the cost of implementation, developing a marketable brand identity is a bargain.

A business or project marketing strategy is the road-map that precisely defines your specific marketing objectives and outlines the most efficient steps necessary to achieve them. Marketing objectives for most business can be broadly categorized as follows:

• Increase penetration into existing markets with your current products and/or services.
• Develop and/or locate new markets for your current products or services.
• Innovate; research and develop new products and services
• Diversify into new markets with new products and services.

It’s important for small businesses and start-ups with limited budgets that only one or two categories or objective should ever be attempted at a time. Your strategy begins to take shape throughout the process, and is a journey of patience, fraught with change. Our marketing experts can help identify answers to three questions of great concern to any business venture; Where is our business now? Where do we want our business to be? What is the applied strategy to reach those goals?

100%. You bet we do. A written marketing plan not only makes it incredibly easier for project and business participants to understand where the business is going and the steps necessary to getting there. A well-written and effective marketing plan can also serve as an important component in approaching financial institutions for loans or attracting serious investment in your business or idea.

The degree of complexity and length of the marketing strategy will largely depend on the size and complexity of the business or project in question. Many small businesses and start-ups can often be documented in just a couple of pages, whereas larger corporate projects and enterprise-level ventures can take dozens or hundreds of pages of documentation and months of planning to be effective.

Monthly progress cheques are highly recommended, even if all signs are indicating positive growth. More in-depth reviews can occur bi-annually or quarterly but it is advised, particularly with very niche campaigns, that you maintain constant and committed analysis of your marketing plan to ensure your course is correct, or to correct course where necessary and as required.

Every digital marketing engagement is a partnership. During the course of this partnership, our team will organize tasks and responsibilities, and formulate a strategy that we will require your assistance with to bring to fruition. The timely completion of requests is extremely important for us to maximize the amount and efficiency of work required in implementing your marketing strategy. If for any reason we are unable to receive relevant important information in a timely manner, it becomes much more difficult to get results and reach the intended goals.

Absolutely, you can. The question to ask is really: “Do I want to do this myself?”. As a professional marketing agency, we have the experience and the expertise to more effectively guide your marketing budget. We carefully plan advertising and marketing solutions in a wide variety of applicable digital mediums to more accurately target the customers you need to reach. We handle your marketing account management so you can concentrate on running your business.

While we do have a master estimate price list, it is recommended that you contact us for a more accurate assessment of your inbound marketing solutions requirements and a free estimate. You can also request a quote here.

We do require a 3-month commitment for most of our digital marketing services, and a 6- or 12-month commitment for inbound marketing. Inbound marketing for your brand or project requires time, patience and a solid commitment to be truly successful.

Of course! We build successful marketing campaigns on a foundation of trust and partnership. We become an extension of your brand and your mission to implement. We provide our clients with a monthly detailed report for full transparency into the work being done and the results of those efforts. This report is delivered by email to clients within the first 2 non-holiday business days of each month, and is backed with consistent email and telephone conversations to discuss campaign performance and suggestions for improvement.

We maintain a general policy of never directly engaging a competitor in your operating space for the course of our engagement. It’s important that we build long-term relationships with you and your brand to effectively strategize a course to marketing success, working with your direct competitors would be counterproductive for everyone involved.