Website design, as well as your online presence, is something your small business can not afford to cut corners on. If you live in the Carmel area and are looking for a New York-based website designer, contact Shawn Tooley today at 315-307-3359.
Whether you’re a new small business owner or a seasoned small business professional, one thing is for sure: the success of your small business depends on maintaining a way to attract new customers. In this age of digital business marketing, it is clear that a professional website design should be the cornerstone of your strategic marketing plan. Small businesses who incorporate a professional website and social media presence get more customers. In short, you want to ensure that your small business is visible in places where people are spending their time.
Web design companies all around the world are working day and night to help small businesses get found online. According to a recent study at MIT, the average consumer spends over 3 hours online each day using a combination of search engines and social media.
According to Google, there are 63,000 search queries done per second in 2018. Therefore, the average consumer in Carmel may perform multiple online searches per day – do you want your small business to show up in a search result for your product or service? You do, right?! Continue reading for more information on what is involved in professional website design and the benefits of incorporating a website design into this year’s marketing budget.
Statistics overwhelmingly show that a small business who has a professional online presence receives far more business opportunities than a small business who uses older marketing techniques like newspaper, radio, or television advertising. We’re positive that reaching customers in Carmel is easier with professional website design.
Responsive Web Design — What Is It And Why Does It Matter?
Responsive web design, in lamens terms, means everything displayed on your small business website looks great on mobile devices and tablets.
10 or 20 years ago people only viewed websites from desktop computers. Most monitors back then were between 15 and 22 inches wide. With that said, nearly all websites were developed so that they would look great on a desktop monitor. However, with the introduction of tablets and smartphones, a great website design needs to look great on all devices. This is where responsive web design technology shines.
Smartphones and tablets have much smaller screen sizes than their desktop counterparts. This means that in order to display website content properly, the website items may need to be rearranged. In the example below, we show the services offered by a construction company. For a standard desktop or laptop monitor, the viewer will see these services listed horizontally.
When viewed on a mobile screen, the website content will need to scale and adjust itself to be readable by the viewer. So in this example, each of the three columns of services would stack on top of one another for readability. This adjustment happens automatically with a good responsive website design.
Responsive website design is no longer an option it’s mandatory. If you’re hiring a website design company in city to build your website, you need to ensure that responsive website design is included in the company’s website design services. If you can’t find a web design portfolio that includes responsive design, choose another web design company in city to be your small business website designer.
Website Design Pages – What Information Should I Include?
Website design doesn’t have to be confusing or complicated. There are 16 fundamental pages to a great small business website design. We’ve taken the time to discuss each one of these website design page necessities below.
Home Page
Your website begins with a home page. This is your primary “overview” page and should provide specific info about what your small business can do for your customers. Website home pages must give visitors a well written overview of what they are going to find on your site.
Products / Services
Websites that incorporate a specific page for each product or service and add details about each perform very well. It’s a good idea to begin each page with a brief summary of the product/service and then add as much information as you can. Remember, if the pages you are building seem like walls of text, you can always break it up into additional pages or add photos to the page to help. Websites without a lot of content usually do not perform well. Your customers are looking for information and they want to get that information ASAP. They don’t want to wait until tomorrow when they can speak to you on the phone. The more information you can provide about your products/services, the better.
Contact Us
Professional website design includes multiple places for your contact information. It should be very easy for your customers to contact you. Create a unique “Contact Us” page, include all of your details in an “About Us” page and it is also recommended to add your name, address, and phone number (called a NAP) to the footer of each page on your website.
Pricing
Equally important is a page you can include on your small business website which displays the price of your product or services. It is ok if you can’t be specific, so long as you can put a price range. Example: professional website design starting at $400.
Testimonials and Product Reviews
Web design professionals often build websites that include testimonials. The goal in a testimonials page is building trust and a testimonial from your current customers can show your new clients that you are trustworthy, reliable and that your services are great! We recommend that you make it a point of every customer interaction to have your happy clients leave positive reviews on your Google and Facebook pages from their home computers a day or two after working with you. Simply send them an email and direct them to the best place to leave a review.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your Customers will have questions!
FAQs have proven to be a huge timesaver for many small business owners. Nobody likes to answer the same question repeatedly – so investing in a FAQ now saves you loads of time later.
Inquiry Form / Contact Us Form
We hope you have a mailing list for your customers in Carmel? If not, get one ASAP. Email marketing is inexpensive and quite effective. To start, most people don’t like giving out too much personal information, so only ask for the basics: Name and Email Address. Then, once every week or so, send an email to your customers and include information that may be of interest to them.
About Us
As we mentioned above, customers love information about your company. The about page is a very important page as it tells your customer 3 key elements.
- Who you are.
- Why they need your service/product.
- Why they should trust your company.
If you own a physical retail store in Carmel, you should also include a photo of your store as well as your business hours. Many small business owners include their mission statement or purpose on this page, information and staff photos, professional biographies and qualifications, recently completed projects, and more.
Policy Pages (Privacy, Refunds, Terms of Service)
Customers like to feel secure when making purchases online, you should provide them with your return/refund policy. Try to avoid legalese and technical terms and spelled out step by step. Privacy continues to be a major issue for customers shopping online. They often have concerns about how their information is going to be used. This can be a major barrier when making a sale. The Internet shopping experience is built on trust and privacy is the number one ingredient in trust.
Blog
Welcome to the most challenging portion of a website design for most small business owners, the dreaded blog pages. Let’s be real: if you’re not a writer – you don’t like to write.
A blog is basically a series of articles that are available on the web which have to do with the category that your small business falls into. Blogs are typically updated quite often using software that allows people without experience in blogging to update and maintain the blog. Blogs are a fantastic tool as they help with SEO, communicating important information to your customers, and adding additional content to your website which helps you stay ahead of your competition. Website designers in city often offer blog writing packages available to their customers to help them keep a weekly blog up to date.
Photo Gallery
Do you have photos of your Carmel business? Excellent! The term “a picture is worth a thousand words” was coined long before the internet was imagined … but now more than ever – it’s importance is visible. Your small business website HAS TO include a photo gallery of some sort. It is very important to how your products or services are being utilized by your customers.
Site Map
Even though this page typically isn’t viewed by your site visitors, it’s a must have for popular search engines. A site map is like a table of contents in a book. A sitemap explains to the search engines about the content that you have on your website so that they can find it easily and when it was last updated.
Website design, as well as your online presence, is something your small business can not afford to cut corners on. If you live in the Carmel area and are looking for a New York based website designer, contact Shawn Tooley today at 315-307-3359.
Website Design Timing – How Long Should It Take?
Small business owners typically only to know two things about web design: how much will it cost and how long will it take until we launch the website? Professional website designers in city will often use plugins and software for your website that will speed up the process of building a website.
When web designers first started designing sites, they hand-coded page after page of content for small business websites. This was a very boring and difficult process. Veteran website designers thought they had to charge a lot of money to compensate them for the many hours building these HTML websites.
Web designers today incorporate content management systems (CMS) into website design with the goal that they can without much of a stretch include extra pages, shading plans, textual style decisions, and give the majority of your site pages a steady look and feel. A popular CMS such as WordPress can cut development time in half and save you lots of money.
Many website specialists will break their web design projects up into multiple phases.
As an example:
Phase One: Discovery – learning as much as they can about your small business before starting a design. This process usually takes anywhere from a day or two to 7 days.
Phase Two: Website Design Mockup – usually performed in Photoshop or as a wireframe. This phase of website design often takes a week to complete.
Phase Three: Website Design Alpha / Beta – an unpublished first draft of your website, which can have multiple revisions. This can feel like the longest phase and can take anywhere from a few days to a few months, it just depends on the size and scope of the project + the functional elements.
Phase Four: On-Page Optimization – SEO is an important part of your website the process of making sure that all of your images and written content are properly optimized for search engine standards. While this can add more time to the project – much of this work is done during phase three of this example. Phase four typically takes another 7 days.
Estimated overall time to complete a website (after content is received):
5 page website = 14 days | 10 page website = 21 days |20 page website = 35 days
Website Design Prices – How Much Will it Cost?
Now to the most important question of them all: how much will this all cost? Honestly, this may surprise you. Website design has a wide range of professionals who charge a wide range of prices. Some developers charge a $x/month fee while others quote each and every job as a unique customized project with seemingly high price tags.
Here are examples of numbers that we believe are fair to both small business owners and developers as a flat fee:
5 page website = $1500 | 10 page website = $2000 | 20 page website = $2750 | Ecommerce Websites = $3000+
North Country Design offers SIMPLE Flat-Rate Pricing!!!
Website design, as well as your online presence, is something your small business can not afford to cut corners on. If you live in the Carmel area and are looking for a New York based website designer, contact Shawn Tooley today at 315-307-3359.
Here are our prices for Fully Managed Website Design in Carmel for flat rate monthly fees:
Landing Page = $99 down & $59/month
5 page website = $200 down / $199/mo.
10 page website = $500 down & $199/mo.
20 page website = $1,000 down & $199/mo.
Note: $199 monthly fee includes all system updates, 1 new blog written monthly, cross-posted to Facebook, Google, & Twitter accounts.
We understand that budgeting can be tough. Give us a call and talk with us about it. We’re reasonable. We can help most people get started.
Website Design and Social Media Channels
Starting in 2021, people all over the world will spend more time shopping online than they will be watching TV, according to new data from measurement company Zenith. Most of that online time will be spent split between searching Google for information, shopping online, and using social media channels.
As a small business owner you should incorporate a couple of social media channels into your marketing plan so that you’re able to reap the benefits in both Google and your customer loyalty.
According to SproutSocial – 73.4 percent of social media users follow local small businesses because they’re interested in their products or services. Beware: 46 percent of social media users will unfollow a brand if they’re posting too many promotional messages.
It’s very important that your marketing messages are written so that they’re valuable to your customer without screaming ‘Click Here To Buy! every day.
Social media is important when you’re running a business in Carmel. Professional website designers often incorporate social media links in their website design because companies like Google like to see social relevancy in your small business. When you post on Facebook, Google, Instagram, or Twitter – a social signal is noticed by Google.
Ongoing social signals and consistent updates to your small business blog is not only really great for your customer engagement… but also to your overall SEO Efforts. When people arelooking for services or products in Carmel can easily find your website.
Website Design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Developing a website for your small business is very important but in order for it to help your business become more profitable, your site needs to be seen in search results as often as possible.
The words that people search for in Google (ex. Professional website design) are referred to as keywords. Whenever searches are carried out using your particular keywords, your small business should appear.
Sites that do not appear on page one of Google results when people carry out searches are basically invisible. If you make sure that your site ranks very high for specific keywords is the sole purpose of SEO. SEO is hands down a critical role in web design.
Value of SEO
Website Development and SEO work together. Today, more web designers are choosing to integrate SEO when designing websites. Let us state again how important it is for small business owners to not only be aware of how important SEO is in terms of their website design – but the financial value it adds to the lead generation process.
See it’s all about traffic. If your website design is compatible with SEO, it will most likely draw more traffic. A website can look cool and represent your business perfectly … but if nobody ever views it, then what’s the point? If it is not search-engine friendly, you are stripping the ability of Google to access your content and rank you properly for your products and services.
Choosing The Best Small Business Website Designer
OK, so you’re ready to hire a website designer in Carmel? Here are some things to keep in mind:
Website designers should want to get to know you, your business, understand your audience, and realize your marketing goals. How can they possibly design a website that reflects your brand if they’re not taking time to get to know you?
Do they have an established, systematic planning process (remember when we spoke about phases of website design above?) that helps lead you through the design phases. A good website designer will usually have all of these things clearly laid out.
Be sure to ask them what they know about SEO and internet marketing. They should be creating a properly optimizedsite that strategically incorporates SEO into the development process.
Remember, a good website design expert is as valuable to your company as a Master Jedi!
Ask your developer for a highly detailed quote with every cost listed clearly and with no surprise charges after the proposal is signed. Be sure to ask what they accept for payment Are you invoiced monthly or do they work on a percentage basis?
Talk to clients they have worked with to see how smooth working with them on a website design project was. Ideally you will want to work with who has great design skills as well as good project management skills.
Learn about the policies for website maintenance. Do they service the website after they’re finished designing it? If you’re going to maintain the site yourself, ask them if they’ll design your site in WordPress so that it is easily maintained by a business owner.
Review your contract line by line and understand if and when you own the copyright to the entire website. All of the content, including graphics that you hired someone to custom-create for you, and all the development code, should be yours at the end of the project. On that note – make sure you own your URL. GoDaddy charges around $20 a year to renew a domain name and it should be in your name on an account that you own.
Website Design: Putting It All Together
In conclusion, the website design project is crucial to the overall success of your small business. Choose a website designer that you can trust to do quality work. Understand the complete process, the pricing, the timeframe, and the inner-workings of the website design process. We can’t stress enough, pick an experienced website designer that you’re happy with who has the best price for the services offered.
Our company would love the opportunity to work with your small business on your website design. Contact us today for a detailed quote which will show you our complete cost, timetable, and references for completing your website design project.
