Website Design Development

5-4-3-2-1.  Five short seconds.  That’s how much time a new visitor will spend on your site before deciding to explore further… or exit out.  

We help our clients keep visitors on their websites longer, and also turn visitors into customers.

  • Studies show that many websites fail to achieve the goals and objectives of the sponsoring business.  Why?  We can help you avoid these pitfalls!
  • Our methodology is proven and will increase visitor page stay times.

Why Most Websites Fail

To create a successful website, there are a few fundamental things to consider about your target audience and your sales strategy: What is your typical visitor looking for? Who is and is not your ideal customer? What is the potential value of each customer, both short and long term?

The answers to these questions and many more will affect the design, content, and structure of your website. Too many times, these questions are overlooked entirely, or the wrong conclusions are drawn from incomplete information or assumptions. We can help you avoid some of these common website failure pitfalls:

  1. Lack of trust building elements
    If website visitors don’t trust you as a reputable company, they will most likely not do business with you. A few examples of trust building elements include professional-looking design, use of original photography, and 3rd party validation such as off-site reviews, verified security certificates, links to industry certifiers showing your certification and so on. Let our extensive research and field testing of best practices assist you in amplifying these trust building elements on your site.
  2. Message mismatching
    Sometimes businesses put out web content that falls short of customer expectations.  Customers view your advertising and then come to your website with advertising influenced expectations.  If your content doesn’t falls short of these expectations, they feel let down and exit your site.  We recognize that each business has a unique customer base with specific needs.   We will work with your business leaders to thoroughly analyze customer base and needs to develop the appropriate message and layout for your website.
  3. Website development shortcomings
    Too many times, coders, developers and designers take shortcuts. Website visitors and your business are always on the losing end of cutting corners on design. Slow pages, incompatibility with specific web browsers or mobile devices, and broken pages lead to potential customers leaving your website. We set a high bar when developing new sites and use strict development standards that make our websites compatible, fast, and ready for search engine optimization.

Does your website fall into any of the above categories? Contact us today to stop losing business online.

 

Our Website Development Process

While most companies start by talking about the design of your website, we start by talking about how to market your website and looking at your competition. We start thinking about messaging, how to build trust, and what the user path will be through your website.

  1. Review of current website situation
    Do you have an existing website? We first explore it together and discuss what works and what doesn’t. If you have yet to do so, we set up website tracking on your website and review the data to come up with educated improvements.  Using real data, we strategize to implement changes on the next version of your website.
  2. Business analysis
    We want to understand your business, including sales process and ideal customers.  By getting to know your business well,  we can do a better job of communicating your value proposition to website visitors.  It also helps us prioritize content in a way that will aid customers in deciding whether you’re the right company for them.
  3. Information architecture and user interface planning
    Your content and pages are organized in a way that makes your website easy to use. “Wireframes”, like a blueprint for your website, are created to put ideas down on paper before heading into the design of the website.
  4. Creative strategy and interface design
    Depending on the message we wish to convey through the design of your website, we will conduct a creative study that will give us a framework for the design of the website. The design of the website will take place in Photoshop by a designer trained in effective interface design techniques. Our designers have undergone hours of training in persuasive design.
  5. Front-end coding
    We use the latest front-end coding standards while ensuring that our websites are compatible with mobile devices and are search engine-friendly. We’ve been creating a growing number of responsive design websites as mobile integration has become increasingly important to business objectives.
  6. Back-end CMS development
    Depending on your needs, we will either customize an off-the-shelf content management system such as Wordpress, Drupal  or Magento (e-commerce) or use a custom-developed CMS. You will be trained in how to use the CMS.
  7. Future improvements and online marketing
    There will always be elements of your website that can be further tested and improved upon. For example, should you feature your top client logos on your homepage, or instead highlight your client testimonials? Which will do better? We like conducting tests to find out and further improve your website as time goes on. After the website has launched, we execute a long term strategy that will bring you qualified customers at a high return on investment.