Southern Connections & Services

SouthernConnections submits firm bids for most work. Our bids are usually competitive. When billing by the hour, the billing rate for most forms of work is $100 per billable hour, billed in 15-minute increments. Do you host client sites? Yes, we do host client sites. We do not commercially host sites for nonclients. Where are your Web-based client support pages and how do clients access them? Some client support pages are password protected. They are not made available to nonclients. Clients are provided with a password and URL in the course of site development. Some support pages are open to anyone who finds them useful. When was Southern Connections Inc. founded? Southern Connections was founded in 1992. Are your Web sites designed to conform with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)? We strive to honor the letter and the spirit of the Americans With Disabilities Act. We give special attention to the Section 508 Standards and the activities of the federal access board. Designing to meet high standards of accessibility is both more profitable for our clients and meets important social goals. Our approach is entirely positive. There is no added cost to our clients. Are your Web sites designed to conform to the accessibility standards of Australia's Disability Discrimination Act? Yes, they are designed and implemented with those standards clearly in view. The president and founder of SouthernConnections believes that access to the handicapped is properly a requirement of doing business. The orgin of that commitment lies in his having been born legally blind and denied corrective lenses until early adolesence. Do high accessibility standards impose more overhead on your work, driving up your bids and rates? Our commitment to accessibility began with the firm. We knew it would require SouthernConnections to be efficient than firms who have made no such commitment. We have made it a part of every move we make. We give no quarter in that regard. As a result, it does not make our work more costly. High accessibility standards do make our work more profitable for our clients. The reasons for that are simplicity incarnate. More people can use highly accessible sites. As a result, our clients reach a larger market. Our clients can do more business, with more customers, more easily, than competitors whose sites are less accessible. Why do you package site-maintenance tools and site design together? Our first client could not in our opinion afford to add technically skilled staff to maintain their site. We did not believe they could afford to purchase off-the-shelf tools and train their staff to use them. To help ensure their success, we created site-maintenance tools for them, and added those tools to the project without cost. That maintenance-tool investment was been repaid by their success. We have built upon the experience of producing that first tool. The Web and out clients' needs have become more complex. As a result, so have our tools. Yet the benefit our clients derive from having easy-to-use site maintenance tools remains economically important to them. One of our key operating principles is that if our clients do not succeed, neither do we. Why do you offer a knowledge-collection service? Keeping abreast of a small set of key issues is important to a client. That client could not afford off-the-shelf business intelligence software suitable to the task and the computing resources to support it. Nor could our client afford to hire staff to do the job by hand. Yet the client needed more time to devote to core business concerns. Working from our interest in artificial intelligence, we had written software to automate that kind of work. We modified and configured our software to meet the client's needs. To make the result affordable, we offered a subscription to what we call a knowledge collection service. Results are delivered via an encrypted connection, and in individually customized form. Do you support blogs and wikki? Yes, we support both. Wikki are client project management tools and well as a good means of providing documentation to clients. We us wikki for both purposes. Blogs support the kind of group interaction that is also useful for project management. We has also adapted blog software to facilitate client management of certain kids of Web sites. We have Scoop-based blog that is open to the public on this site. We are moving to Java-based blog and wikki servers because we can both customize them more readily and ensure a high level of security for our clients who need secure, distributed interactivity. A publicly accessible example will be availabe by start of business on Monday, Aug. 1, 2004.