PROFILE OF A HIGH-END DESIGN FIRM : : As a designer puts it: ``The difference between us and others is that all they know is to make graphics spin on a Website. [They] don't know anything about the organizational dynamics of their clients. We do.''
Here are profiles of two firms that have scored high in the high-end corporate market:
In Stamford, CT, Leapfrog refers to itself as a multimedia design firm, while ISL of San Francisco positions itself as a digital strategy and software development company.
Both have fewer than 15 employees and use contractors and freelancers regularly to complete projects, most of which are related to Web development and software programming. Both target corporations that are not only willing to invest heavily in setting up a Website, but who are also actually doing business over the Internet.

THEIR CORPORATE CLIENT BASE : : Leapfrog, for example, is expected this fall to revamp the Website at Hubbell, a $1.3-billion manufacturer of electrical and lighting products. The goal is to set up an online entry system that allows distributors of Hubbell products to order directly from the Website, said David Didato, president of Leapfrog.
``They're seeing the value of doing commerce over the Net,'' Didato said.
In addition to Hubbell, Leapfrog has recently completed the design of a Website at Cheslock, Bakker & Associates, an investment banking firm that specializes in the acquisition and financing of commercial real estate. The four-month project, which started out as a CD-ROM, grew bigger as CBA wanted to put online tens of thousands of pages of its documents on real estate financing deals. ``It's an improved information delivery device,'' said John Anderson, vice president of CBA.
Like Leapfrog, ISL has won a growing list of these corporations that value the Internet. In less than two months this summer, ISL redesigned the Website at Montgomery Securities, a large San Francisco brokerage house.
The new site now enables Montgomery clients to access the most up-to-date research reports from its army of analysts as well as a litany of investment advice all generated by a powerful Illustra relational database engine, said David Ferguson, president of ISL, which stands for Insights and Logic.
Ferguson said his next assignment is to revamp the design of the Website at Chevron, a key client that has been working with ISL on a number of Internet and Intranet projects. Earlier ISL was responsible for keeping the look and feel of scores of Intranets consistent throughout Chevron, which involves 16 divisions and 200 workgroups. At one point ``there were two dozen Websites underway. It was a nightmare,'' Ferguson said.

TIPS ON WORKING WITH LARGE CORPORATIONS : : While the complexity of dealing with a large organization like Chevron may be a daunting task for some, firms like ISL and Leapfrog relish the opportunity.
``It's not about programming,'' Ferguson said. ``It's about organization development. It's a lot of meetings and I'm good at using the whiteboard and dry eraser.''
``Large corporations need to be serviced differently,'' Didato said. ``You have to be sensitive to the inter-departmental power struggle. One division may have a different idea from the other and there's the potential of duplicating information on the Website. So you need a very macro view of everything, [the ability to] conceptualize it and break it down so that the public can easily digest it.''
Ferguson said he was once asked by a client to use a technology from a specific company to build a Website because the client was doing business with that company.
``It's not a bad tool,'' Ferguson said. ``But if they didn't have that customer, we would not have put that product in.'' However, he stressed that ``we will challenge a client if what they want to do is a bad strategic move.''
Ferguson and Didato declined to reveal the revenues of their firms and would only say that they are profitable and expanding quickly. Ferguson's firm charges its clients an hourly rate between $60 and $300. Didato would not comment on his rates.

HOW THEY GOT INTO WEB DESIGN : : Both have been working in the computer industry for decades. Ferguson started his career as a financial analyst in the 70s, then moved into the business of selling word-processing products from Wang and Linear. Developing robust database applications became his core competency in the early 90s. When Netscape Communications came along in 1993, Ferguson felt he was well positioned in offering database design work on the Internet.
``Now we're a 100 percent Internet and Intranet company that is object relational database-driven,'' he said.
Didato, on the other hand, became keenly aware of the potential of desktop publishing in the early 80s, especially after convincing the fashion industry in New York City to adopt a new mode of communication. In 1992, Didato felt another trend was afoot: Multimedia.
``We made a decision that multimedia is the business to be in and that's where I wanted to satisfy my creative needs,'' Didato said. Since then, he has been cutting CD-ROMs for large corporations, even doing music scores for some.

ON THE COMPETITION "SHAKE-OUT" : : Ferguson and Didato said they're not particularly concerned about competition or even some of the external forces that could change the Web design community.
While Web authoring tools and HTML programming will only become more user-friendly and perhaps require little training and expert advice, the Web design marketplace could face consolidations as well, with better-financed and better-managed firms gobbling up smaller ones to build national and international presence.
``Sure there's going to be a shake-out,'' Ferguson said. ``But we're not a general Web design firm. We're strategic management oriented. We are not the RFP (request for proposal) type. We never made a cold call. It's all word of mouth. We'd like to be represented as a partner. We don't want to be just a service bureau.''
Didato added, ``Everybody is trying to design Web pages. But what we offer is the designing, programming and hosting infrastructure of the large corporate sites.''
Ferguson said the introduction of new technologies does not necessarily render his job obsolete. In fact, he sees the Internet as the engine that fuels the overall industry growth, boosting service and product needs of all kinds.
``The Web creates demand,'' he said. ``One of my clients ran out of annual report this year because, ironically, they've got so many more of their customers now ordering it from their Website.''

RELATED ARTICLES : :

• Case Study: Setting the Standard, PCWeek, July, 1996
• The Next Wave: The Small Business Intranet, Inter@ctive Week, March, 1996
• Designing For New Web Technologies, Inter@ctive Week, November 1995
• Designing For Success, Inter@ctive Week, October, 1995