Website Design

What is Website Design

Website design is the process of creating websites. Within the area of website design, you will need a proper layout, content, and graphic design. While some websites are heavily coded by true web developers, others are designed using a user-friendly interface requiring little or no coding ability.

What kind of Website do you need

Consider different kinds of websites and what your business needs out of your new website design.

Landing Page

Either a one-page website or a specific targeted landing page built as a destination on your existing website.

Branded

Branded websites provide information to potential customers but do not allow any extra functionalities.

E-Commerce

E-Commerce websites allow the physical sale of your companies goods or services right on the website.

Custom

Customized websites allow for booking appointments or other functionalities that we build & integrate.

How to get started

Deciding whether or not you need a new website designed can be a challenge. Consider if your website is mobile-friendly and run a speed test at tools.pingdom.com. These two things will show you how your current website stacks up in comparison to your marketplace. Once you’ve decided to design a new website, you’ll need to choose a content management system you can navigate well or hire someone with experience as a website designer.

Do It Yourself

Many platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly exist to help people with no coding ability design a decent-looking website. For a business on a budget with more time than revenue, this may be the right decision. However, good enough does not translate into the best conversion from your website as a client acquisition tool. Consider carefully how much the value of just a few lost clients due to poor loading times or glitched images, etc on your site is worth to your business. If the answer is a four-figure number or higher, strongly consider hiring the right professional website designer or team for your company to put the best foot forward!

Hire a Website Designer

Website design is one of the core services, as such of course we would love to design your new website. (AND WE’RE GREAT AT IT!) However, we would also like to recommend that when checking out who to design your new website consider how well they take the time to get to know your project’s needs. Look at prior examples of finished work and run speed and performance tests to identify the lasting value of websites they have built in the past. Just a little bit of research can save you a HUGE headache down the road.

Speed & Performance

When building a new website here we make certain that we set up the right foundation for success. By building with code instead of short-code we optimize the tiniest building blocks of our websites to be indexed and read better by search engines. Making certain that every photo has an alt text and one step farther to geo-tagging photos before they are uploaded to the website increases the relevance of the data within your website. Checking the proper content density and keyword density within your existing content also fixes ranking factors, allowing for better ranking based just on your website itself.

Metadata

Simply having metadata exist on your website is not enough, although many sites do not even have this on them. Metadata is data that provides information about the page it exists on. We cover metadata in the form of your meta title, meta description, and meta keywords. Schema markup, another form of metadata creates an enhanced description or rich snippet to appear in search results. This specific set of data is extremely important as it is how your website communicates to search engines further what your website is really about.2

Hosting

Dedicated, shared and cloud hosting are a few of the many different options out there to host your website. We typically use WPX Hosting because of all the added benefits like a free SSL certificate and daily backups built into their basic hosting package, but also because we can consistently and easily get a website to load in under a second with a very high-performance score. Based on metrics like site traffic and special demands we also work often with Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services of Liquid Web. Utilizing shared hosting environments which are often the cheapest route with even the most well-known companies may save you a buck or two but will drastically bring down your website speed and performance.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Website Design?

Website design is the design of websites for their display on the internet. Specifically focused on the end user’s experience, website design is all about the look and feel of the website, not the actual development of the code behind it. In 2019, this focus is mobile-first because the majority of web traffic now takes place on a mobile or tablet device. Shifting from designing websites for a desktop browser to a mobile screen is something we did years ago as an easy way to increase conversions on a website.

Can I Just Redesign My Existing Website?

Maybe, but not likely or advisable. Working within outdated frameworks or content management systems is never advised. Oftentimes, updated a dating website just takes longer than it would start over from scratch. Other issues like your website not showing responsive on mobile are also not able to be fixed the majority of the time.

Can I Design my Website Myself?

Yes, you certainly can. However, doing so for most people means that your website may cost less but will not be as good as a competitor’s website who just hired the right professional. In many areas of your business, it makes sense to learn how to do it from the ground up. In the area of website design or website development though, costly mistakes can lead to hundreds of missed opportunities. Your business does not have the time to wait for you to learn what your website needs today, much less the time it takes to stay up to date on every update. Many pieces of website technology are updated on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. Designing your own website should only be a way to save money while your business is starting out, this will not work as an ongoing strategy though. Our team does work with you in order to make certain your end website project matches or exceeds your visual and performance-based expectations.

Can I Get a Free Website

Many sites like WordPress.org and Wix.com provide a free sub-domain to design a website or blog page. However, since they are on a sub-domain they will not rank in Google search. You do need to pay for a domain, hosting, and a service like Wix or the like to actually get your website out there to the public. A good starting point for an amateur but no, there are not any actual free websites out there for the taking.