Power Design
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40 Under 40 Philadelphia Young Business Leaders
February 17, 1995

Power Design occupies a pair of offices in a building in downtown Wayne. Vertically striped wall-paper in earthy tones, misty green carpet and black office furniture make the place seem professional and stylish. Delaney 35, and Lisa Jablonski 30, came to the Web out of a television graphics background. Both have won Emmys for their television graphics for the Olympic Games. They founded Power Design, Inc. in 1994 as a print, video and multi-media graphics agency. Their Web site was originally just an on-line portfolio until Power’s Web design business took off after the designers were featured on a local FOX TV 90 second news report in February. Suddenly, the phone started ringing off the hook. Everyone wanted to know about the Web. How could they get on? Power has gone from 20 percent to 80 percent Web design work. “It’s flip-flopped in the last six months,” Delaney says.

Like many other Web designers, Delaney and partner Jablonski want to go beyond scanning logos and cranking out Web pages and catalogues. “There’s potential to make money,” says Delaney. But they’re not after quick cash. “If we wanted to make money, we wouldn’t turn work away.”

“The Web is now a new frontier,” says Delaney, who like Jablonski, left full-time better paying jobs in television. “I always felt limited with TV” Jablonski says.

Right now the graphic ability is much more limited than television, but Jablonski enjoys the challenges proposed by the technology in its current state.

We see it as a short term thing,” says Jablonski. The Internet will come to change. The Web will evolve into something else and Power Design will follow the technology.

Though she and Delaney work at least six days a week, “We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” says Jablonski.

The Power Design homepage looks like a commercial for detergent and breakfast cereal, displaying product packages with photos of Jablonski and Delaney as preteenagers on the boxes.

The common wisdom these days is that a Web site needs changing content. Delaney and Jablonski encourage clients to have some sort of gimmick to promote the site. T-shirts, quizzes, articles, whatever keeps people coming back.

Power Design’s site features a regular t-shirt giveaway for the wittiest response to a droll query. Questions: Why is toilet paper on a roll? Answer: ‘Cause bagels have holes. Rabbi Haim Cassorla, of Valdosta, GA., now has a Power Design t-shirt. Much of Delaney and Jablonski’s time is spent educating potential customers about the Web. In fact, they’ve had to scale down their presentations so that they can get some work done.

In their current one-hour presentation, says Delaney, “we actually walk them through a site that we’ve done.”

A good portion of the sale pitch involves dispelling the Web page myth: Build it; they will come and you will get rich quick.

“They think they’re going to get instant results,” says Jablonski. You have to work a site for it to generate business. Power’s clients include Parkside Studios, a local film production company; Delaware Valley Cable Council (to be launched in May); and the Contractor Network. A referral service for the construction industry could be a very dry site, but for the Contractor Network, Delaney and Jablonski have created a lively site with a home improvement theme. There are also articles and questions-and-answer sections. And of course, prizes. Excerpt from “Generation X-ceptional, 30 under 30”


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