About

• How We Got Started
• Philosophy
• Technology
• Mission Statement

How We Got Started

furfly.net is truly a small business. We started out in April, 1999 with two people and seven cats (the name begins to make more sense now, eh?). We (that is, Mike and Janine) wanted to start our own business and run it by our rules, where customer service and satisfaction are just as important, if not more important, than the bottom line.

After working for established companies for years, we finally decided that 1999 was the year for us to go out on our own; we knew we could do a great job at this if we could make our own decisions. So we set up an office in our home, tried to teach the cats to step over the keyboards, not on them, and opened for business.

In May, 1999 we started getting busy, and realized we were going to need some help. We now have several more people working with us, and we'll continue to add more as the need arises. You can watch us grow on our People page.

Our Philosophy

We started this business because we wanted to offer excellent customer service, and that is our primary philosophy: treat the customer well and he/she will be happy, and will speak well of us to others. Sounds obvious, but too many companies just don't seem to get it!

We make these promises to our customers:

• We will only sign a customer if we truly feel we can do our best work for him/her.
• We will work with our customers to define exactly what they want us to create for them - look, feel, content, purpose, etc. We will design the web site you want, not the web site we think you should have (although we will provide as much design input as you would like from us).
• We will set realistic deadlines, and will do our absolute best to meet them. If we can't meet a deadline we'll alert the customer to the delay as soon as we become aware of it, and will give a new deadline right away.
• We will respond to customer contact (e-mail, phone calls, etc) in a timely manner.
• We will maintain excellent communication with our customers in every way, including individual project status and information on system or software problems if they occur. If a problem occurs which was our fault, we will go out of our way to disclose that fact; we truly believe that honesty is the best policy.
• If a customer asks us to do something we don't know how to do, we will tell them so, and give an honest opinion on whether it's something we can learn to do well. If it's not, we will provide as much assistance as necessary to find someone who can do it, and will work with that person to ensure that the task is done to the customer's satisfaction.

Our Technology

We use Intel servers running Red Hat Linux; we keep our systems at Exodus (the place for clean power and great network connectivity). Janine uses an identical Linux system for her development work, and Mike uses an Apple Macintosh for graphics and design work and Linux for systems maintenance and such. Our database is Oracle, our web server is AOLServer , and we use the ArsDigita toolkit, which is full of nifty things ranging from scripts for monitoring the health of the web servers to a full e-commerce package.

We are very nearly a Microsoft-Free Zone; we do have several systems running Windows only because there are things you just can't get any other way. Plus, the vast majority of people out there are on Windows so we can't just pretend it doesn't exist. But whenever possible we choose a UNIX or Apple solution.

Our Mission Statement

Most companies these days seem to have a mission statement, a nice catchy phrase they can use to start out their PowerPoint presentations to venture capitalists. Well, we don't use PowerPoint and we're not looking for any venture capital, but we have a mission statement anyway:

"Create websites with artistry and purpose, and try to have enough time left over to have a life, too".

We're still working on that last part...