Company Description
Charming Design is the freelance web development company of Niek Kouwenberg, specialised in web standard compliant and PHP driven websites. With clients in several countries around Europe, it has grown to a booming business.
History—The Past Six Years
It all started out early in 2001 when I got bored and tried to make a website. I started to work around with Microsoft FrontPage, but that sucked. In a few months I had learned HTML, and went on making websites for friend an family. I kept on learning, and within a year I had learned both CSS and PHP.
After that quick introduction to web design, I was asked to build a website for a radio show (The Punk Hour). Within one year this website evolved from a small frames-page to one of Holland's bigger e-zines.
During that period I made myself a web design company, and got really skilled at working with CSS and PHP. After this, business began to roll and I got more clients from all over Europe.
Introducing Web Standards
In the start of 2004, I started looking into web standards. Web standards are rules for making internet-documents, like webpages and stylesheets. Most web developers and applications don't follow these standards exactly, and make websites that work well in Microsoft Internet Explorer, but break in other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Safari.
Not working according to the standards means that one out of seven visitors cannot view that website. And I just want my websites to rock for every last visitor.
Change of Strategy
As of lately I changed my company strategy. At first I wanted to make complete websites, but I found out I wasn't that good of a designer. Because my programming skills were so good, that had to be the focus point.
So my main focus now is making extensive dynamic websites with control panels for easy maintenance. I try to be more selective when it comes to new clients, since I had too much projects waiting last year.
I changed my tag-line according to this new strategy too: “Works like a charm”.