A well built website is key to reaching clients
To a small business, a well built website is essential for growth. Consumers are web savvy and research products and services before spending their hard earned money. You have to establish trust and expertise in order for them to choose you over your competitors. The best way to do that online is with a professionally built website.
Web design and development should not be a cookie cutter process. While there are certainly goals that need to be achieved on all sites, building a website using cookie cutter templates should never be a thing. Your business is unique, your customers are unique, and your website needs to be unique as well.
– Web Design Workflow
Free Consultation
Before the work begins, we’ll sit down with you and determine what your business needs, what you want, and discuss options for your success! We’ll gather brand info and find out what makes your business unique!
Strategize
After we meet, we’ll put our heads together and come up with a plan, ideas, and work in your branding. We want your website to be as unique as your business is so that you always stand apart from your competition.
Layout
After your go-ahead, we’ll start on the coding and design! We also make sure your site displays correctly on screens of all sizes and make sure that all of your branding and offerings are in place.
Content Creation
Once the layout is complete and everything is visually in place, we move on to creating compelling content such as custom writing, photos and graphics that make your website stand out.
Revisions
Although you’ll be invited to weigh in every step of the way, once the website is done, we will go through the entire site with you and make any changes you may want before the website goes live to the public.
Launch
Once everything is exactly how you want it, the website will go live to the public and your customers can visit it! Woo Hoo! It’s a great feeling to have a fresh new look!
So, what does every website need?
- Built with a mobile first approach – data shows that most websites are accessed by smartphones. But that doesn’t mean ignoring other devices.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices built in- because even if it’s not important to your business now, it may be later.
- Branding – because the customer needs consistency across the board to accurately recognize your business without confusion.
- Clear, concise, and quick content – well written websites allow the customer to quickly find and digest the information that they need.
Determining the right kind of website
Before you ever start thinking about what the site will look like, you need to know what purpose your website will serve. There are endless possibilities.
Will your website be used simply to drive traffic to your business? In that case, a website with basic information and a blog that you update regularly would work well for you. (Pssst! If you can’t keep up with your blog, we offer writing services as well!)
Do you want to be able to sell products online? An e-commerce website is definitely the way forward!
Or would you like your website to perform a function? We can do that, too!
What can a web application do for my business?
One of our favorite websites we’ve built is for a construction company that has an amazingly informative customer facing website, with a hidden web application, in their case an employee portal, for their employees to fill out necessary information while doing an inspection. The website ultimately sends off very professional looking PDF quotes and reports to their clients. Applications like these save businesses labor and money by automating tasks that would normally require much more human input and provides the customers with a well built and styled quote.
Another example is a salon that integrates their hairstylists’ schedules and allows the customer to schedule online with their preferred stylist – not just vaguely request an appointment. Or the HVAC company that sends SMS notifications to let you know their technician is on the way, with a photo and credentials of the technician to assure you that the correct person is at your door.
There are so many opportunities to make your website work for you. This is one of many reasons that we don’t believe in a one size fits all web design approach.
E-Commerce websites that don’t suck
An e-commerce website allows you to sell your products online. There is a lot that goes into building them. Much more than you may think. The truth is, many point of sale programs nowadays have built in e-commerce functionality, but there are so many problems with using them. A few main problems are:
- Very little customization
- Locked into using a subdomain of the POS
- Very little SEO opportunities
- Not very functional to the customer
- Slow and frustrating to the customer and the search engines
- Locked in to keeping the Point of Sale
You may be thinking “But I could have a working website up with all of my inventory already there!” and you would be correct. However, it’s really important to think about the SEO in this case. You can’t sell online if nobody can find your website. And you need to consider your clients needs as well. Even if you told them that they can buy your thingamabobs at www.mypointofsale.mybusinessname.com would they remember? Or would they remember www.mybusinessname.com more easily? If they can’t remember the domain name and they can’t find the business in the search engines, how much product are you actually going to sell? The bottom line is, if you want to make money by selling products or services online, you need a real web developer.
SEO
We encourage you to learn more about SEO and what it can do for your business. Simply put, search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, provides well built content to search engines. The search engine algorithms are extremely smart and able to detect how good or bad the human experience on a website will be. The algorithm ranks your site based on this analysis. There are a lot of factors ranging from your website’s code to the readability of the content you (or we) provide. To further mystify the process, Google alone changes their algorithm between 500-600 times per year. They don’t provide details and although many of these changes don’t really affect the results of your rankings, some of them do, in fact, change the way we serve them the information they need by the content we provide. This is a key argument in favor of a long term SEO plan.
However, for those who aren’t ready to commit to a plan, all websites that we build are built using SEO best practices. This means that we won’t use bloated code, we won’t use any trickery, and we will build the site to be ready for SEO when you are.
We can also do a one time optimization of your website when we build it that will set the foundation and provide a solid start. We will provide you with suggestions and instructions on how to build on this foundation, should you choose to take a more DIY approach.
