Choosing a Web Design Company: Tips Every Small Business Owner Should Know
As a small business, you want results for every cent you put into your brand. When it comes to your online presence, you know that your website is likely your first and best way to make a good impression on potential customers. Engaging, high quality web design is essential in making sure your website is up to date, easy to navigate and primed for conversion with great copy and imagery, and intuitive SEO.
Choosing a web design company that aligns with all your needs as a small business shouldn’t cause you extra stress or a ton of extra work, so it’s important to know what to look out for when hiring the right agency for your company. Let’s go over some helpful tips to get you exactly what you and your company need.
#1. The Agency and Their Team are Experienced
As a small business, whenever you are ready to invest in your company, every cent counts. Hiring a web design company that has years of experience in creating engaging websites for the type of business you run is of the utmost importance. Experience means the agency you are choosing has refined how they create and know exactly what they are doing from draft to execution of your project.
When a web design agency has a quality team of designers, developers and marketers, you will be getting a product that not only looks professional and put together, but that will work to get you the leads and conversions that they advertise in their pitch. If you want your website to generate business for you, make sure the web design company has marketing experience and case studies that prove their skill and spark your creativity and vision, not hinder it. You want to be impressed by whomever you hire, as they should be bringing years of ideas, innovation and results to the table.
#2. They Keep Up With Design Trends
Being out of date is a non-starter for a web design agency. Trends are trends because people are noticing and spending based on updates that convert. Make sure the agency you hire is tuned into the latest and greatest design trends and are able to communicate the benefits of their approach in plain terms and can tie them back to what’s most important about investing in your website — return on investment.
Trends can also mean technology, such as responsive design, parallax scrolling, and social media integration. While trends can slowly tip towards fad if you are not too careful, there always needs to be a balance with “what works” and “what’s new.”
Remember: aesthetics plus a great user experience means more opportunities to convert. A recent Stanford study showed that 75% of people judge a company by their web design and another showed that 94% of users said that their first impressions of a company were solely based on the design of the website they were on.
#3. They Listen to Your Ideas and Participate with Their Own
No one knows your business better than you do. You know every product and every detail about your business. When hiring a web design company, you want them to just email a proposal without hearing your ideas or seeing what you have to offer as well. This just means what they are handing you isn’t personalised or customised at all towards your company. You want a web design firm that will listen and use your ideas to help shape how they will market and design your website.
On the flip side, while it is absolutely important for the agency to listen to you, you will be working with professionals who know exactly what they are doing and they will be bringing years of design experience to their ideas and strategy. The company you choose should be able to bring their knowledge and create a marriage of ideas with concepts you have brought to the table as well. It is perfectly fine to let them take the driver’s seat, just make sure you are still in the car with them.
#4. They Place a Focus on Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is one of the most important design elements you will integrate into your website. Making your website optimised and suitable for every device and every screen size leaves no one behind when it comes to viewing your page. If you don’t incorporate mobile viewing into your design, you are losing out on the majority of potential conversions — as mobile accounts for more than half of web traffic worldwide. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, mobile devices generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic.
Make sure your design company is well-versed in responsive design and that they will make sure your page is properly optimised for the best web experience for every potential customer.
#5. They Grow and Improve with You
A great creative agency can continue to grow your brand and establish new goals even after the website is done. Once the design is finished, that’s when the real marketing begins.
Many web design agencies bundle SEO (search engine optimisation) and data analytics services to help take your brand to the next level by quantifying what works and what doesn’t in your marketing strategy. Your creative partner should continue to measure progress and improve off of what you have accomplished. It is always best to hire a company that offers extended marketing options and works to grow your site — your success is their success.
Quality Web Design and SEO Starts With Atlantic Management
Atlantic Management is a boutique web agency that prides itself on digital marketing and WordPress web development that looks good and is technically awesome!
Whilst you can use your marketing budget on paid advertisements and spend all day every day on social media, that can be an expensive, time-consuming route that does not necessarily bring the kind of web traffic you desire.
There are countless marketing tactics and strategies out there all claiming to give you overnight success, but it’s all BS. These “gurus” are trying to sell you into the dream that digital space is easy. It’s not! It takes a lot of hard work.
Work with us and turn your ideas into a more elevated and profitable business with the power of SEO, SEM and SMM. Contact us today to learn how we can get you the traffic you need to help your business grow and thrive.