Archive for category Web Design and Development
Seattle Web Design – Should I Use a Custom Theme?
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on March 17, 2015
If you’re using a CMS that supports themes, then one of your first questions is probably whether or not you need a unique, custom theme, or if you can get away with purchasing an existing one, or even using a free-to-use theme. The answer to the latter is, probably not, there will be thousands of websites with that theme, which is a definite disadvantage for making your website stand out on the web. The answer to the second is that it depends, and you may want to consider your options. The following help from Seattle web design experts should help you decide if you need a custom theme or not.
Why Use a Custom Theme?
A custom theme is advantageous for a number of reasons, especially if you’re just one of a number of similar Seattle businesses. Whether you use Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or one of another of the countless available CMS systems available, you can likely download a number of free and cheap themes that allow you to easily set up and get your business running. Unfortunately, that’s the problem. The cheaper and easier they are, the more businesses who will use them. Over time, consumers may become confused by seeing the same websites with different brand names, which generally reduces the impact of your branding and consumer messages.
It also affects your SEO, because most web based algorithms track uniqueness. When you have a website theme, none of your code is unique because other people, and potentially thousands of other websites are using it. When you have a custom theme, you won’t have any of these problems.
However, custom themes cost more, take longer to get up, and might delay your website launch if you’re planning it quickly. While custom themes have a lot of advantages for branding and some advantages for SEO, they might not be the best choice right away if you plan on launching your site immediately. However, you can plan to launch immediately with an available theme and plan a re-launch with a custom option for a few months or a year down the road.
What is Your Web Traffic and Web Based Revenue?
A custom theme typically costs upwards of $500, and many more than twice or three times that depending on the size, complexity and required features. Depending on how much money your website is going to generate, a custom theme might not be a good business decision, especially not if you own a small business. If you mostly want a one to five page website so that your customers have somewhere to go if they look you up on the web, then a custom theme might set you back a great deal of money when you would be better off investing it in advertising to boost your online sales. However, if you’re already making a great deal of money off of your website, or have the potential to, then a custom theme can be part of your marketing plan, because it is good business sense for branding, custom advertising, and standing out from the competition.
Want a quote? Contact Rory Martin’s Seattle web design team at 206-402-6347 for a consultation.
Seattle Web Design – Redesigning Your Website
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on February 17, 2015
If you’re ready to redesign your website, then you’re probably wondering about the steps and processes that go into it. While a lot of what goes into redesigning is decision making on your part, the following include the steps taken by Seattle web design teams when reorganizing, revamping, and redesigning websites.
Kickoffs and Meetings
The first step to redesigning your website is talking over your needs, ideas, and dislikes with your team. They will make suggestions, you will make suggestions, and both parties will walk away with a clearer idea of what you actually want. This is one of the most important reasons to hire a local Seattle web designer, because you can actually get together and talk to them, instead of trying to communicate your ideas over the web.
Structuring Content
After writing up ideas, a web design team will begin structuring content to create a mockup of the new design. Structuring is the planning of where photos, call to actions, slogans, and web content fit onto the site. It is an important part of the process because it allows both the web design team and the editorial team to work together to create something. Once your team has structured content, both teams can go to work, even if you’ve hired them separately.
Web Design
Most of the time, when you redesign your website, you get completely new web content. This is logical because it’s usually easier to start from scratch or with new ideas than to drastically change and existing website. If you’re using a theme or preexisting CMS with a custom theme, then your new web design should be finished fairly quickly, but usually you do get to see mockups first to ensure that you like the ideas.
Content Editing
If you want entirely new web content, then part of the web design is usually just that, although not all web designers offer copywriting. If you want the content to be tweaked, re-arranged, or improved, that is also an option, although it depends a great deal on you. Web content usually takes considerably less time than web design, meaning that you can have it back to approve well in advance of the website going back online. Most of the time, if you’re paying for new web design, you will want new content as well, or at least reorganized content so that it fits your new website better, suits the voice better, and if there are any errors, they are fixed.
Graphics and Artwork
If you haven’t chosen the graphics and artwork for your website, then your web design team can handle that too. In some cases, you may want custom imagery, in which case you need a photographer to come in and take quality photos. Otherwise, stock imagery will be purchased and used to brighten up the website.
If you wan to know more about redesigning websites, you can contact the Rory Martin Seattle web design team, for a consultation to ask about your site, or go ahead and make the hire to start with your kickoff meeting.
Seattle Web Development and Design: What Affect Your Bottom Line?
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on February 10, 2015
Paying for quality web design is an understood part of doing business on the web, but do you know how it affects your bottom line? Does having a certain type of website, or a quality looking website, actually affect sales? Actually, studies show that having a ‘credible’ looking website affects sales, and it scaled a four out of five on the level of importance. If you’re interested in improving your web design, the following include a few tips from Seattle web development professionals on what actually affects your ROI.
Clutter
Did you know that minimalistic, clean websites are more professional and usually convert better than cluttered and crowded websites? The natural idea is to try to fit everything in, but statistics show, that might actually hurt your business. Keep your tabs, submenus, and features to a minimum, and focus on offering the best quality possible for what you do have. This holds true for your web design as well. A minimalistic look with large, clean graphics, rather than more images, serves you better.
UX Design
User Experience is incredibly important for professionalism and sales. If the user can easily navigate a website, get a clear idea of what to do, and not feel marketed to, then they are more likely to purchase something. While UX design can be complicated, it’s mostly the idea of planning out your website, taking consumers from top to bottom, and then to secondary pages, and guiding them through your website. UX is making it easy for the customer to purchase something.
Content
You may have guessed that your content, including graphics and web copy, affect your sales a great deal. For graphics, you want large, unique images as often as possible. Clutter is always bad. Web copy is a little more difficult. You need well written content that avoids clichés, is easy to read, flows, well, and doesn’t make it obvious that it’s trying to sell something. Obnoxious calls to action may have worked in the past, but the modern Internet prefers to be talked to rather than marketed to.
Frequent Updates
New, content is the best way to tell your consumers that you’re still around and you’re still relevant. By updating your website frequently, keeping dates on your website to that year, and blogging regularly, you tell your consumers that you’re always around, and that you’re reliable. No one wants to purchase anything from a website that hasn’t been updated since 2012, mainly because the might not know if the website is still in business. This does mean you need a quality Content Management System.
Professionalism
If your website looks professional, then you look professional. Because a website represents your brand on the internet, it is every bit as important to be professional online as it is in your business. Your text, your conduct on blogs, and your site design should all reflect that, because they do impact your business and sales.
Want to know more about how quality web design can improve your business? Or, do you need a quality, modern website to help boost your conversion rates? Contact Rory Martin to ask about a consultation, or browse through our past websites to see what we’ve done for other clients.
Seattle Web Design – Why A Unique Website?
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on January 26, 2015
If you’re getting ready to hire a Seattle web designer, then you’re probably asking a lot of questions. This article is about one important question that is bound to come up in any web design conversation. Why would you need a unique website? A unique website is a custom site designed around your needs, ideas, and values. usually created by either a web designer or a web developer. In either case, you can choose to use the website with an existing content management system or have a web developer design something around your needs. The following include several reasons why a unique website benefits you as a business.
Custom Websites Stand Out
Having a website that stands out is especially important if you have a number of local competitors, or a number of competitors who deliver affordably in the Seattle area. If you use a theme, then you run a certain risk of blending in with hundreds of other websites that your users and target audience probably visits on a daily or monthly basis. If your site looks the same, you won’t stand out. Because one of the main rules of marketing is to be memorable, you can probably understand why standing out, especially on the web where there are so many options, is beneficial to you. If you use a template, no matter how convenient, your website will still look like a thousand other websites. In fact, most of the popular free themes have 3,000 or more downloads, while themes that run around $50 per, usually already have several hundred.
A Custom Design Is Flexible
If you want a specific menu, banners in certain places, your graphics to be a specific size, or your shop to display images in a certain way, then you need a custom design. Unfortunately, themes are made to other people’s specifications, which means, not to yours. If you want something to suit you perfectly, then it has to be custom made.
You Can Still Use Your Favorite CMS
If you have your heart set on using Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress with your website, don’t worry, you still can with a custom theme. In fact, it’s actually the most affordable way to go. You simply pay someone to design you a custom theme for that CMS, they set it up for you, and then you continue to use the back end of the site that you are familiar with. In fact, many major websites like CNN use custom themes with a CMS. CNN uses Wordpress.
While custom websites are flexible, easy, and great for marketing, they aren’t always the only option. It’s easy to use a theme and make it your own with the right graphics, just make sure that they are the right ones. However, there are a lot of benefits to custom sites, and you shouldn’t discount them entirely based on cost. If you’re not sure, consider having a discussion with a local Seattle web designer to talk about what’s popular, what works, and what you need.
Why You Should Hold a Kickoff Meeting With Your Seattle Web Development Team
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on January 6, 2015
Whether you’re hiring your first web development team or hiring someone to make small updates to your existent content, they will probably offer you a kickoff meeting (if they don’t, go find another developer). While it may seem like a waste of your time to get together and have a meeting with your web developer, after all, some people hire international rather than local Seattle web developers, there are a couple of pretty convincing reasons why you should take them up on the offer and attend the meeting.
What is a Kickoff Meeting
A kickoff meeting is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a meeting where you go over initial design ideas, tell your web developers what you want, and if you’re lucky, they will show you any preliminary ideas. This sort of meeting can be done over the web if you’re short on time, but you can also show up to get to meet your designers, and they can meet you to get a better feel for who you are and what you might want. Some developers will want to host the meeting in your place of business so that they can get an idea of what your business is like as well, which is helpful when creating a design.
What Should You Discuss with Your Web Designers
A great kickoff meeting will allow you to discuss your needs, desires, and requirements for the product. In return, web designers will discuss product viability, feasibility, budget, time constraints, and any preliminary options for the site. You’ll cover topics like your brand, your core products, your product purpose, and most importantly, getting everyone involved to submit ideas, suggestions, and other information which might be helpful for creating a finalized idea of what you want your website to be.
Preparing for your Kickoff Meeting
While your web developer should do most of the prep work for the kickoff meeting, you can make sure that you are prepared by bringing along ideas of what you want your site to look like, lists of requirements, timelines, and items such as crucial elements of your website. If you have a separate web designer, then you’ll want to bring them along to the kickoff meeting as well so that they can work with the developer, but most development teams include design in the package.
Other than that, you really just have to set up a time and a place, and then start talking to your web developers about what you want and need in a site. From there, they can decide which direction you want to go, get a better idea of the feel of your company, and choose an appropriate direction, so that you get a website you truly love. A good kickoff meeting sets the stage for a whole project, and the ability to hold them is actually one of the reasons why you should choose a local Seattle web development team, rather than choosing one in Austin, Texas.
Want to know more? Contact Rory Martin to discuss your web development needs.
Seattle Web Development: Do You Need Mobile Web?
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on December 17, 2014
Seattle Web Development: Do You Need Mobile Web?
If you’ve been looking around for a website designer then you’ve probably heard or seen the term ‘mobile web’ a few times. If you’ve been reading up on what your website should and should not have on a blog then you’ve probably heard it more than a few times. The mobile web is a vast and confusing place if you’re new to the world of web development, but, whether you have an existing website or you’re planning on hiring a local Seattle web developer to build one for you, you’re probably only wondering one thing about the mobile web, do you need it?
What is the Mobile Web?
The mobile web is technically any part of the web designed for mobile use. For the most part, that means websites and menus which resize or adjust or are sized properly for phones and tablets. Because traditional websites are often too big to display properly, or display so small that it is impossible to read or select the menus comfortably, the mobile web makes using the web easier.
Do You Have Mobile Traffic?
If you already have a website, then the easiest way to see if a mobile website could benefit you is to check your mobile traffic. If you have any analytics program (the free version from Google will do the trick), you can easily check to see which percentage of your visitors visit on a browser vs. a tablet or phone. Some will even tell you the specific devices such as Samsung Galaxy or iPhone that you’re getting your traffic from.
If you don’t have a website or don’t have analytics (or don’t know how to use your analytics) then you can also go by general statistics. Right now, mobile usage is trending upwards, more than 60% of users research shops, restaurants, and stores on their phone before visiting them, and more than 70% of consumers research products and cross compare them on their phone before purchasing. Essentially, if you sell products, have a store, or have anything that users may want to research online first, then the mobile web could directly impact your sales.
What Are My Options?
There are multiple options for anyone who wants to have a website that’s compatible with the mobile web, but sometimes the best thing to do is to talk to your Seattle web developer about your needs and your site first. Some websites work well with mobile websites set up separately, although these do have their issues with search engine optimization and duplicate content. You can set your website to automatically re-direct to your mobile version whenever someone logs on from a mobile device. You can also have your web designer set up a responsive web desing that resizes based on your visitors, but this isn’t always ideal.
Do you want to talk about which mobile web option is best for your website? Try talking to one of the professional Seattle web developers at Rory Martin before you make your decision.
What’s the Difference Between Web Design and Web Development?
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on December 2, 2014
If you’re getting ready to hire a Seattle web design or development company to create your website, then it is important to know the difference between them. While many business owners often confuse the two, web design and web development are two different things, and depending on which you hire, will create vastly different outcomes. While some of the best Seattle website companies offer both, you should be able to distinguish between the two.
What is Web Design
Web design is the visual element of a website. It includes your graphics, your layout, your branding, and usually a good part of your UX. Web designers are graphic artists and designers who specialize in creating websites. When you hire a web design company, you’re paying for someone to create the look and feel of your website as others will see it. Most of them then either work with a web developer to create a CMS and the back end code for your website, or use an existing CMS such as Joomla to skip the web developer. Things that a web designer may offer include page design, landing page design, brand analysis, website branding, lead generation forms, email marketing templates, and more.
What is Web Development
Web developers create the functionality behind your website, they also create the back end, where you can interact with your site, add content, and otherwise edit it. Web developers are code experts, and although some of them are also graphic editors and able to do web design as well as development, not all of them are. A web developer might create you a website, and then allow you to design the graphics, colors, and style yourself. Another might work with a web designer to hand you a complete website. Web development is programming rather than graphic design, and web development usually costs a great deal more than web design. However, if you don’t want to use a pre-existing CMS, then you do need a developer. Items that web developers offer include website design, ecommerce creation and integration, interface development, database management systems or integration, email marketing development, landing pages, form creation, and more.
Which Should You Choose?
Most of the time, you want a web team that handles both development and design. However, you can usually save money by hiring a web designer and using a pre-existing CMS like Joomla to power your site. In some cases, you may also want to stick with a developer. For example, if you’re creating a storefront that mostly just needs a banner header and focus on the products, rather than great design.
Essentially, depending on your website and your needs, you might need one, the other, or both. You can decide on your own which you need, or discuss your needs with a professional Seattle web developer to see what they recommend based on your budget, your goal website, and your needs. There are plenty of reasons to go either way, so your best bet is to talk it out with a professional and choose based on your needs.
Seattle Web Design Tips: How to Tell Your Designer What You Really Want
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on November 11, 2014
Seattle Web Design Tips: How to Tell Your Designer What You Really Want
Communication between website owner and website designer has always been more than a little hazy, with the former often knowing what they want in theory without really knowing how to put that across in firm physical descriptions to designers. Most of the time “I want it to pop more” or “it should remind me of Pistachio ice cream” just isn’t going to cut it, unless you add more background information. Because even the best web designer can’t see your image, their idea of this thing could be something completely different then yours. So, here are a few of the best ways that Seattle web designers agree you can use to get across what you really want.
Make Sure They Know Your Business
If you hire a great Seattle web designer then the first thing they’re going to do is familiarize themselves with you and your business. If they haven’t and you’re not yet ready to switch designers, make sure you tell them about your ideals, business meaning, and anything else that they can use to recreate the feel of ‘who you are’ onto a website. Business branding requires personality, and you want to make sure that the web designer knows yours.
Share Concepts That You Like
If you take the time and go over a few websites or portfolio pieces with the web designer to let them know which styles and themes you like and do not like, you stand a better chance of getting something that you love. While not every web designer wants to sit down and discuss their portfolio with you, it will definitely make sure that they go into creating the design with a good idea of which pieces you like.
Create Reasons For Changes
When you ask for changes try going into detail as to why. If you’re not familiar with graphic design or terminology, that’s okay, just use normal language and say why you want it to look different in your language. For example, rather than saying “it should pop more” say “I think that some of the colors should be brighter, I want it to stand out a little bit more, and grab attention”, and then explain why. Discussing your needs with your Seattle web designer allows them to do their job.
Discuss What You Want
If you don’t know what you want, then you probably want to either sit down and talk it out with the designer, or work it out before finding a designer. Unfortunately, you can waste a lot of time and money looking for the perfect website if you don’t yet know what that website is. So, get a good idea of what it is you want from your website, and then after a discussion with a designer or developer, get into the web project knowing exactly what you want. This ensures that you get what you want, and you won’t have to do multiple revisions or eventually completely scrap the project.
Hiring a Seattle web designer is a big deal but by communicating openly, sharing ideas, and making sure everyone is on the same page, you can ensure that you get a website you love.
Seattle Web Design – Top Features for Business Websites
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on October 21, 2014
If you’re about to set up a website for your business for the first time then you really want to start considering the features and options you want on the website. While you can discuss your needs and any good local web design team will be able to tell you what you need, it’s also a good idea to decide what you want and why before you go. Here are a few of the things that Seattle web designers agree are the best features for business websites.
Great UX
UX is probably the most important thing to integrate into your web design. UX or User Experience refers to design that specifically makes it easy for users to visit and navigate your site. This means clean design, simple menus, and easy navigation. While it may mean skipping some of the bells and whistles, it does mean a better site.
Contact Information
If you want to look professional to local visitors then you want as much contact information available on the site as possible. The best way to go is to put some information in the header or footer and create a dedicated page with everything visitors need to get in touch.
Integrated Social Media
Visitors want to see that you’re an established business and the easiest way to show them that is to link in your social profiles. Showing a Facebook profile or Google Plus followers is the easiest way to convince modern web users that your site is established and trustworthy. Because many online shoppers actually research using social, many will actually click through to your business page and perhaps even like the page, which makes your social marketing that much easier.
Graphics
The web is quickly becoming a very graphic driven place, and using graphics on your website creates a modern look. While you might be prepared to put up a few pictures of your products and perhaps a few stock photos, you should also consider creating graphic centric pages that center around an image. This makes your website cleaner, more modern, and simpler for viewers.
Mobile Ready
Whether you choose to go mobile friendly with a specific mobile website or with a responsive design, you need mobile friendly. An study showed that some 40% of Seattle smartphone owners use their phones to research businesses and products before shopping, even when out shopping, meaning that if your site is not mobile friendly, you could loose customers.
As a business, you want a website that is simple, easy to use, and informative. If you’re operating a web shop, you also want to make sure that your site is secure, offers secure protocol protection, and that it loads quickly enough to allow users to access and research products from their phones. Other than that, most of your services and pages might be unique to your business.
Want to know more about what goes into a great website? Or want to talk with professional Seattle web designers about building your perfect business website? Contact us today at 206-355-0894 to get a free estimate.
Seattle Web Designers Discuss: Better Brand Analysis For Better Websites
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on September 9, 2014
Web branding has become a crucial part of marketing over the past few years, but while many businesses are more than ready to integrate branding into their social and marketing strategies, few take the time to design their websites around a solid branding concept. Despite that, branding efforts have been proven to increase both sales and brand loyalty, especially on web orientated businesses.
But what is branding? While many people assume that branding is a logo or a slogan, it’s actually something more. A brand is business identity. While many brands try to influence their brand image, it is the consumers who eventually create their own versions of the brand. How does this affect your website?
Visual Identity
Your visual identity is a huge influencer on your brand, partially because it affects everything that you control that your consumers can see. Visual identity includes colors, images, graphics, logo and header sizes, slogans, and basically everything that many people consider to be ‘branding’. It’s what people see on your website, and it is important. A brand analysis at this stage tells you what brand emotions to focus on, which consumers to target the website for, and what your competitors are doing, so that you can be different but better than them. Visual identity can be impressive to a consumer, but unless it is extremely bad, it won’t really make or break your website on its own. Visual identity is part of your UI, or User Interface, and it is a good idea to invest in a web designer who can represent you properly.
UX
UX is another part of your brand identity, and one that fewer people think about. UX is usability and it affects your website through several functions. The first is that it makes a website easy to use, which is beneficial to your consumer, to reducing the cost of customer service, and to improving brand loyalty. The second is that a good UX is actually present in planned content, meaning that everything present on your page becomes part of a design, intended to guide the user down the page to a call to action in order to create a lead or make a sale. A user friendly design with integrated UX is becoming increasingly important for improving consumer loyalty, and for making sales in the first place. In fact, one Australian study on multiple websites showed that return customers jumped up 17% after integrating UX into the design.
Today’s internet market is highly competitive and if you want your website to thrive, then you have to integrate branding. And that means using a better brand analysis to capture the essence of your company, your consumers, and your competition in order to formulate a digital picture of who you are as a business. For a Seattle what you want people to see, think, and feel when they visit your site. Investments in improving digital can provide as much as an 83% return, and as web purchases rise, that number is likely to as well.
Want to get started on brand analysis so that we can get started on creating a branded website for your business? Contact us today, or visit our web design page to learn more.
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