Website Update and Full Design Services

All our web designs start with a meeting to learn your online marketing objectives. Every web design should have clear “call to actions” that are measured, reviewed and tweaked over time. For example, a real estate agent setting up a new website may wish for new listings and buyers to work with. Therefore, we’d want to make sure that every page makes a clear request to the site visitor to use the “contact us” form to make those connections. In the back-end, we’d track the number of visits to the contact us form and how many people actually filled out the form.

Google Keyword PlannerWhen a website is being designed, one has to know what search engine terms people are using to try to find your site. For example, keyword research with tools like Google Keyword Planner might identify that more people search for “Victoria real estate” than “Victoria homes for sale”. Therefore we may then wish then to ensure that the web design only contains the term “Victoria real estate” . Alternately, we may see from a competitive analysis that “Victoria real estate” is such a competitive term to rank for in the search engines that it would be better to attract more visitors by instead optimizing the site for “Victoria homes for sale” if few other companies were optimized for that term. Strategizing web design upfront is key to the site’s success.

Next, we need to determine what content the web design ought to have to meet your objective. A site map and menu structure is determined. Often, generating the content can be the most time-consuming part of a new web design as business owners must reflect and forward marketing material for the designer to work with. The web designer can make assumptions on your behalf, but the best outcome arises when the information comes from you – the expert in your business’s field.

We feel that website hosting is a specialty unto itself best left to large commodity providers such as Bluehost, HostGator, Go Daddy, 1&1 and Islandnet. If you need a host, we’ll recommend one based on your needs, set-up an account for you, your web design, your domain name and email. We set-up our client sites so that they are routinely backed up and can be moved to another web host should the selected host performance decline. You are not tied to your hosting provider or PPC Solutions in any way. For small sites, website hosts typically cost around $75 per year including the first year of your company domain name. Domain name renewals are usually around $10 per year.

Years ago, web design was done from the ground up with a designer having to create custom HTML for each and every page. It was a time-consuming and costly affair. A change in a menu on one page meant a change on all pages and when you needed a new web design, you had to start all over again. We recommend the use of a modern Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. WordPress allows non-technical people to add, edit, and remove pages from a website. Further, WordPress allows for a variety of free “plug-ins” that allow you to extend the capability of WordPress. For example, a recent client wanted to list all their organization’s members on a members page and allow their members to update their own entries. There’s a free plug-in for that. Years ago, one would have had to hire a programmer to custom create that module.

Content Management Systems like WordPress allow you to change the look of the web design by downloading a different “theme”. A theme is a free or low-cost ($50) module that determines the graphical look of the web design such as the positioning of its key elements, fonts, colours etc. Based on the client’s personal preferences and site’s objectives, we usually suggest two or more themes from sources such as ThemeForest for you to review and select from. While no single theme may be exactly what you have in mind, that’s okay. We’ll choose one that is close and make minor changes from there. This saves considerable time and cost from starting with a blank screen.

Web design is like fashion, and inevitably what looks great now will seem passé in a few years time. When that happens, all we need to do is to select a new theme and your existing content will automatically be reformatted to the new style by the content management system.

We recommend a theme that is responsive so that it nicely re-formats no matter what device or screen size it is viewed on. We also recommend retina ready themes that are able to display higher resolution images for those with higher resolution devices that will eventually become the norm.

Once the theme is chosen, the next step is to populate the site with the agreed upon content and test the site with internal stakeholders. We’ll ensure that your web design is search engine friendly and properly set-up in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.