OUR MISSION

era//404 provides quality design, development, and marketing services. We strive to be the conduits for your vision. Our only business is customer satisfaction.

era//404 History
era//404 Creative Group, Inc. was founded by Don Citarella in August 2001 with the sole purpose of changing the way companies look at visual communication.

With a wide variety of outlets for design and development services, especially in New York, companies tended to work piece-meal with different studios. They would call on Company A to do their identity, Company B to create their stationery system, Company C to do their site, etc. In listening to our clients, we learned quickly that they preferred working with one company to provide all design and development solutions. Their goal was to find a multi-disciplinary studio that offered a broad array of services where this relationship would handle all their needs.

This was the foundation for era//404. However, the trade-off with this approach, in a traditional business structure, means that companies would have two options:

1. A studio that offers complete design and development services does not have to focus to excel in specific areas.
2. A studio that staffs people with different specializations, full-time, needs to pass this overhead to clients.

The solution to this issue was surprisingly simple, and the heart of why era//404 is so different. In fact, our clients' needs are the reason that era//404 exists in the form that it does today.

The Network
era//404 is a network of designers, developers and artisans located all over the world. The hub of the network are the engagement managers, based in New York City. Prospects and clients meet with the engagement managers to discuss their needs and skilled members of the team are selected for the work. While design may be created in Denver, CO, the programming may be moved to Sao Paolo, Brazil. era//404 designers in Switzerland may interface with developers in Calgary, Alberta.

The entire network works on a project-by-project basis to ensure that no undue overhead is passed to clients. Equally, clients work directly with engagement managers on all aspects of the creative work to ensure the project runs smoothly, quickly, and cost-effectively. The result is a grassroots mechanism to solve the needs of clients who have been seeking a low-cost, creative and experienced design studio. Our uniqueness in structure ends up saving our clients time, money and labor.

Additionally, talent is selected based on specific focus and expertise. At any given time, there may be fifteen web designers in the network, each with different skillsets: ecommerce programmers, flash animators, actionscripters, template developers, database administrators, GUI designers, etc. Since our clients communicate directly with engagement managers, working with era//404 is the equivilant of hiring one person (at the same hourly) that is skilled in every facet of design and development.

The Future
As era//404 continues to grow, the network expands and contracts. New talent is hired every day and unreliable people are stripped from the system. This keeps our estimates lean, our design/development cutting edge and our focus strong. As each project passes, the network is refined more and more to ensure that the best talent is always matched with the job at hand. Our engagement managers prize their experience in communicating with clients and vendors as it is the crux of everything we do. And though our ultimate goal is our clients' satisfaction, we constantly strive to ensure work comes in under budget, before deadline and with ground-breaking design, development and ingenuity.

You've always been told that on the wheel of time, money, and quality, you can have two options at most. Welcome to the new era.

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