Today we’d like to introduce you to Steve Lovisa.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Steve. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I worked at various Chicago-area agencies for about 10 years before I decided to start my first business in 2005–a boutique digital agency that grew to include 9 full-time designers, developers and project managers. I ran that business for more than 8 years before our largest client, Red Frog Events, approached us about merging our team with their in-house creative and technical teams, putting me at the helm. It was an opportunity we didn’t want to pass up.
In all, my teams and I worked on building more than 30 brands and websites to help support Red Frog’s nationwide events. It was an amazing and valuable experience, and a heck of a lot of fun.
In 2016, I started building a new agency to put all of my brand-building and web marketing experiences to work for small and medium-sized businesses throughout the Chicago area, and across the country. PixelPeople is all about becoming true partners with our clients–getting to know their missions and their businesses inside and out–so we can continue our great work and help our clients grow, as we’ve done for so many new brands and businesses in the past.
Has it been a smooth road?
It feels like there are more obstacles the second time around, but I may just be more eager and impatient about growing the business to become everything I know it can be. The landscape has definitely changed. I would say there’s more competition–both more specialists on the high end of the spectrum, and more inexpensive options on the low end of the spectrum. But we’re uniquely situated in the middle, where fast-growing businesses need the most help with professional branding and marketing while they’re focused on their own mission.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the PixelPeople story. Tell us more about the business.
While we provide a full-spectrum of creative and technical services, our two main specialties would be branding and website design & development.
When it comes to branding, my background includes a lot of brands that had to go from concept to launch in about 30 days. That “fast track” process turns out to be very well-suited to small and medium-sized businesses who understand the importance of getting branding right, but don’t have 6-12 months and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on it. We can get it done right, quickly and relatively affordably.
In terms of website development, we’ve become experts in building custom WordPress themes. We do all custom work because we know it’s important for our clients’ sites to convey a unique brand image, and for the site’s features to be a natural extension of their business. And we use WordPress because there’s no need to reinvent the wheel with every site. It’s a popular, robust and secure platform that gives us the core we need to get new sites up and running quickly. And we have the development expertise to build custom plugins or extend the WordPress base in whatever ways our clients need.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Technology moves so fast, I’m sure there will be lots of developments over the next 10 years that we can barely imagine now. But the recent trend I’m most excited about is the blurring of the lines between mobile websites and mobile apps. With the fast-growing capabilities of modern browsers, we’re seeing mobile websites become more app-like–and at the same time, mobile apps are becoming more like mobile web pages. When the differences disappear, consumers will benefit by having more consistent experiences across platforms, and marketers will get a more complete & accurate picture of the ways that consumers interact with their brands.
Contact Info:
- Address: 200 S. Wacker Drive, Suite 3100, Chicago, IL 60606
50 S. Main Street, Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60540 - Website: pixelpeople.com
- Phone: 1 (877) 860-3903
- Email: contact@pixelpeople.com
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/pixelpeopleinc
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/pixelpeopleus
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/pixelpeople-chicago
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pixel-people-inc-
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