While hiring a professional web design team, it is important to ask a few key questions to ensure they’re the right fit for your business. A web designer is going to communicate your business’s image and message online to reach additional potential customers.

It is important the web designer has experience, skills and resources to get the job done successfully. When choosing a web designer, here are a few key questions to ask:

Five Questions to Ask a Web Designer

1.) How will I make changes to my site?
Content management systems will allow you to make changes to your website easily on your own time. Some companies will have a 48 hour turn-around time and when you need something changed quickly (such as a 24-hour special, closed notice, etc.), it is vital to update your website in a timely manner with that information. Be sure to ask if there is a training session for the content management system as well!

2.) Do I own my site if we part ways?
Be sure to not toss money away! The website purchased should be owned by you when it has been completed. Should the relationship with the web design company turn sour, ownership will allow you to transfer it to another web host easily. Admin access for the content management system, cPanel and FTP access are all required to make this transition go as smoothly as possible.

3.) Is my site responsive?
Being able to access all areas of a website on a mobile device is extremely important to customers. If a website is hard to use on mobile devices, there is a possibility of customers navigating to another website. Additionally, a responsive website is important to search engine optimization.

4.) Do you have examples of work in my industry?
Having a designer that has worked with clients in your industry could be beneficial to you. The end result is also going to depend on communicating your business goals, what functions you would like to see on your website and what you find to be important. If you’re looking for a team that can achieve a specific look, feel or function, the first meeting is the perfect time to ask this question.

5.) What is the expected launch date?
Depending on the scope of the project, the timeline can be anywhere from a week to a month. All design teams have different methods. Communicate your timeline to the design and programming team and ask for a to-do list to complete (website photos, content, hosting and domain information, etc.). Everyone on board need to have the same launch date goal to keep things on track.

The process of choosing a design team can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be! Ask questions, communicate your wants, needs and goals. Leave us a comment and let us know what questions you ask your web designer!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the the method of getting a website ranked organically in search engine results. There are key elements that go on-page and off-page SEO, including link building, page titles and descriptions, image file names, alt tags, link title tags and more. It seems easy enough, however, when using website builders such as Wix, you may run into more issues than expected.

SEO Methods and Wix

As mentioned in our article “The Do’s and Don’ts of Images“, image titles and alt tags are a large element of on-page search engine optimization. Wix will change the image file name to include scrambled numbers, letters and underscores. An alt and title tag are both available for images, however, only the alt tag should be used. The title tag does not carry any weight for SEO and are only visible when someone hovers over an image. The alt tag describes to search engines what your image is. For WordPress or HTML websites, image titles remain the same as when you uploaded them and alt tags and captions are available for optimization; additionally, image titles remain the same as when you uploaded them.

Websites built with this “do-it-yourself” tool are powered by JavaScript (JS), which makes the customization of the coding nearly impossible. However, Google values websites with clean code. Instead of using DIVs and other elements, they are put into the JS of the website, making it messy, jumbled and hard to read.

Furthermore, Wix plans can be expensive, include advertisements, have limited add-ons and mobile usability. Customers are unable to move a website to another hosting provider, so the website would have to be rebuilt.

Wix is not a long term solution for your business’ website. With jumbled coding and lack of optimization methods, organic result rankings will be complicated and take an extended amount of time, resulting in losing potential business.

Appearance isn’t everything for your business’ website and there are other options available. Our team recommends using a content management system, such as WordPress, which offers multiple plug-ins and themes to make your website function just the way you want! With thousands of plug-ins for search engine optimization, photo galleries, shopping carts the options are endless! Give us a call to discuss custom design or one of our responsive templates.

Color is a powerful element that can make or break a design for websites or print. When you’re using a color palette that does not compliment each other or causes a negative reaction, you are risking not making a conversion.

The color spectrum is separated into cool (blues, purples and greens) and warm (yellow, orange and red) tones. Depending on the tones you are using, this can cause reactions such as excitement, confidence, anger or discomfort. Due to this, the overall idea and goal of the project should be taken into consideration when choosing your color palette. You should always ask your self: what are you wanting your audience to feel when they see your design?

What Colors Mean

Cool Tones

Green – Commonly associated with money, green is a color that symbolizes growth. A yellow-green can indicate illness while an olive-green is usually a color of peace.
Blue – Blue conveys sadness, calm, secure or professionalism. This color works well as an accent color but can also be used as a main color.
Purple – Many will associate this deep color with royalty, wealth or luxury.

Warm Tones

Red – Using reds are going to bring in strong emotions, usually associated with either anger or love. It is a fine line when using this color, but when used correctly it can be very impacting.
Orange – Orange is a warmer tone that draws attention to specific areas of your website, it brings forth emotions of excitement or enthusiasm. Website examples:
Yellow – If you’re looking to bring a cheerful color palette to your design, yellow is the way to go! (Although, it can also have the same effect as the red tones and cause anger.) Yellow is similar to white, in that it is going to be harder on the eyes so this color should be used sparingly.
Black – Although this color is usually thought of as grief, mystery or the unknown, black is a great formal and elegant color perfect for galleries or portfolios for videos, photos, digital art or web.
White – Cleanliness, innocence or purity are what come to mind if you ask someone their opinions on white. White can be harsher on the eyes, so it is important to have a nice balance of contrasting colors.

Our Favorite Color Resources

Kuler – Choose your color rule, analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound or shades so select a color palette perfect for your project!
Colour Lovers – Using Colour Lovers, you’re able to find palette for your home, web, print or digital art. You can even build your own color palette and share them with the design community.

Other resources include Paletton – and Coolors.

With over 46,000 plugins to make website maintenance easier, WordPress is our choice for a content management system. The plugins we use depends on our client’s needs, from booking calendar, volunteer sign-ups to photo galleries. Here are our team’s choices of plugins when we first set up your WordPress powered website:

Our Top Three WordPress Plugins

Wordfence Security – Wordfence’s constant updating feed keeps your website from getting hacked. The live traffic view tracks users that have navigated your website, the pages they navigated to, etc. Be sure to add your email to the notifications to receive updates on invalid logins, major site changes, and more. Recommendation: Avoid using “Admin” as a username to increase the security of your website.

Yoasts’ WordPress SEO – Our search engine optimization analyst’s go-to SEO plugin is Yoast. Duplicate titles and descriptions can cause problems for your search engine optimization. By using Yoast you’re able to set a unique title and description for your pages and posts. Other features include no-index, no-follow, canonicalization and more!

Total Cache – The speed of your website is extremely important to your search engine optimization; test the speed of your website by going to Google’s Page Speed to see how your page performs. Install this plugin, refresh and see the result!

What are some of your favorite SEO plugins? Let us know in the comments or on our Facebook. For additional reading, read our post on The Basics of a Website and get started today!

Creating a new website can sometimes be intimidating and you may not be sure exactly where to start. With this week’s blog post in our Back to Basics series, we will talk about a few key components we take when it comes to launching a brand new website.

• Choose a Domain: Businesses want to avoid using .net or .org as users are typically going to type .com first; if the other extensions are available, you can register those as well, but it is important to keep in mind, if you do not have .com registered you could be losing potential clients. It is important for your domain name should be short and easy for users to remember.
• Choose a Hosting Company: It is important to find a hosting company with reliable up-time and quick response time if a problem on your website arises. With over 15 years of experience, our programmers have found that LiquidWeb offers the best plans and support perfect for every one! Advanced Digital, Inc. offers premium hosting services, contact us for more information.
• Build Your Website: Our programmers recommend using a content management system, such as WordPress, to build your website. With an extensive list of themes available and plug-ins to make your website function just the way you want it, very little HTML knowledge is needed when creating pages and blog posts.
  • Photography: Using stock photography is a great resource when building your website. However, if you’re selling products, you want to be sure to use have professional photos taken and edited. For additional learning, check out our article on the Do’s and Don’ts of Images for a few of our favorite resources.
  • Contact Form: Users should be able to contact you very quickly without struggling to find your information. Be sure to have a specific contact page, with a form, your phone number a map of your location, etc.
  • Search Engine Optimization: It is important that all of your website’s pages are optimized with titles, descriptions and link titles.
  • Responsive: With potential customers browsing on their mobile devices, you want to make sure your website is built so all information is available to them.
  • Launch: That’s right! Once your website is built and ready to go it is time to finally hit that launch button! Changing settings on your domain can result in propagation time of 24-48 hours.
• Add Google Analytics and Monitor Performance with Web Master Tools: Keep an eye on the number of visitors your website, bounce rate, keywords users are using to find your page in search results, set up goals and more! This is one step you don’t want to miss.

Once your website has been launched, you’re ready to start working on your search engine optimization! If you’re looking for a custom designed website, our team has over 15 years of experience in design and programming.