Mortimer Smythe Designs

I consulted Mortimer Smythe Designs twice for website design. I am pleased with both the organizational website and the personal one. In 2012, I helped my organization find a website designer to upgrade our stodgy site. We considered 20 candidates and studied 6 proposals. We hired MSD because they submitted the best proposal and quoted the best price.
To further lower the price, my nonprofit group eliminated a few features and provided a sandbox (testing and staging environment for web development). We didn’t have photographs of ourselves to enliven the site, so Ethan Jones used public domain art. For the Home Page, Ethan offered two designs and we chose the one we thought conveyed our identity at first glance. The website is elegant and easy to navigate.
The personal website was for a long-​deceased relative who worked in the film industry. I wanted an esthetic site befitting an artistic man. Ethan, Holly Hine and their team surpassed my suggestions with fresh ideas of their own. In addition, they provided technical features I wanted, such as clicking on a graphic and getting a synopsis and clicking on a photo and getting a magnification. They always responded promptly to my e-​mails and phone messages. I highly recommend them.

It is a pleasure to act as Project Manager for Mortimer Smythe Designs. I thoroughly enjoy working with Ethan and the programmers and designers, in collaboration to see a project through from the beginning to it’s best possible completion and implementation. Professional, friendly, comprehensive, and many pleased clients. A+

I was one of Ethan’s first customers. As the matter of fact when he gave me my original quote, I told him I needed to pay him more for his efforts. Well, fast forward 3 years and countless referrals… They get a large job and Ethan wants to charge me 7 times my normal rate. I objected and asked for my old rates for 2 reasons. 1. It was just plain unfair 2. I couldn’t afford to pay the HUGE increase. And then all heck broke loose. He brought down all of my sites because he handled the hosting (with Godaddy but charged 2 times their rate), hid my files inside in sub files (3 programmers couldn’t find them) and gave me 3 days to pay him or he would erase my files. Basically holding me hostage. So I had to play by his rules and his rules only, pay him 10 times what anyone else would charge to have my files transferred.
When I objected he accused me of threatening him. He really caused my business great harm. A really wacky company in my opinion. Ethan may come off as nice but when you question him, things turn around in a hurry.
If you plan to do business with them, make sure you are in possession of YOUR files because as soon as you tell him that you may have to take your business elsewhere, things could get ugly fast.

Ethan’s ‘white hat’ SEO (search engine optimization) techniques brought our website search results though the roof. He has easily tripled our incoming calls = $$$. He really listens to your business goals and advises with useful marketing strategy. Ethan works with you to help build your online business success. I can not recommend enough.

All web sites are comparably priced and anyone can build something that looks pretty. The benefit of using Mortimer Smythe is getting not only a nice looking site at a reasonable price, but most importantly, a highly functioning one. Ethan was very professional and prompt; he got our firm’s website up very quickly (a couple weeks at most) and explained SEO thoroughly so that I can easily update it for constant improvement depending on the feedback I get via Google Analytics on a weekly basis. This weekly email is part of the basic package by the way and requires minimal effort on my part — which is important as a busy business owner. Since the website has been built, Ethan has been very accessible when I have questions about changing or updating content, or about web or email hosting. His response time is less than a day and sometimes less than an hour, including weekends. It took very little time for our firm to start showing up on the search engines and we have seen tremendous growth, in large part due to our online presence through the website and blogs. I would absolutely use Ethan in the future for our SEO and design needs.

Thanks to Mortimer Smythe Designs, for their professional approach, a great looking functioning website. They know their industry and their continuing help