Website Design Washington DC

It is not difficult to understand why most businesses are willing to pay top dollar for website design work. The website is the most important aspect of your brand’s online presence and it is important that it is designed well. Your brand’s website is also the place where you nurture your bottom of the funnel leads to get conversions. So, you cannot afford any website fails that might cause your potential customers to bounce off your website.

Your website needs to be designed keeping your audience in mind and should ensure that it provides good user experience. We are one of the leading agencies for web design in Washington DC and offer our services at affordable prices.

There are also a lot of other benefits of a good website design for both your business and your audience.

It sets the first impression

When your audience visits your website, it gives them the first impression of your business. They will judge your business within seconds of landing on your website. So, in these first few seconds, you would want to make a positive impact on your audience.

If your website looks unappealing or outdated, your audience will immediately have a negative impression of your business and deters them from your page. You will miss out on leads because they will leave your site for a competitor’s page. Good website design helps keep traffic on your page.

It aids your SEO strategy

The web design elements and practices affect how you publish content on your website, which in turn, affects how search engines crawl and index your website. This is one thing you cannot afford to mess up. If your on-page SEO fundamentals are not up to the mark, you will be fighting an uphill battle for visibility from the start.

In addition to how content is published on your website, certain web design elements can also have a direct impact on the SEO of the website. Web design can be difficult to comprehend if you’re not familiar with how it works, but to put it simply, your code needs to be SEO-friendly.

However, the best way to ensure proper web design practice and subsequent search engine visibility is to partner with a website design Washington DC agency that knows what they are doing.

It sets the impression for customer service

People will judge how a business will treat them by looking at their website. Your website design gives them the vision as to how you view your audience. If you don’t put any effort into your website’s design, your audience knows that you won’t put effort into helping them as well. Your website acts as a customer service representative. If your website is bright, modern, inviting, and easy-to-use, your audience will feel more welcome on your page. This gives them the impression that you are open and welcoming to new people who visit your website.

An outdated and unappealing site makes your business appear cold and aloof. People don’t want to check out a business that doesn’t value them enough to make a good first impression.

Your website is the digital face of your business. Think, if someone walks into your office, wouldn’t you want a friendly face to greet them and make them feel welcome? An updated and modern website is equivalent to that friendly face greeting your new visitors.

It builds trust with your audience

People don’t trust poorly designed websites. If they see your poor design or the information is not updated, they won’t trust you. They may view your site as shady because you don’t have an updated web design.

For instance, you are a manufacturing company and a person is looking to place a bulk order with you. He/she is spending a tremendous amount of money, which means if your manufacturing website design doesn’t convey trust, they will find another business to fulfill their order.

A professional looking website signals trust with your audience and in turn they will trust your business and feel comfortable checking it out further. So, it is important to have a great web design and for this hiring, the best web design agency is a good move.

With that said, have you ever wondered what work goes into creating a website design? What do web designers do to ensure websites achieve their objectives? Well, here in this article we will tell you.

The website design process can be lengthy and complex. But it doesn’t need to be. Here at Web Guru DC, we simplify everything for our clients. This includes both our web design and the branding process.

To help you easily understand and get the most out of your website design project, we have outlined the entire website design process, from start to finish.

Our Website Design Process

Step 1 — Research and Analysis

Once the agreement has been made between Web Guru DC and the client, our designing team starts the project. The first step in designing a successful website is gathering all the information. Our experts plan and start your project by conducting an initial interview and engaging stakeholders in the process. It involves a good understanding of you, what your business goals and dreams are, and how the website can be utilized to help you achieve those goals. We take a strategic approach to assess the needs of the organization; looking at long-term objectives and internal as well as external influencers.

It is important that your website designer start off by asking a lot of questions to help them understand your business and your needs in a website.

Certain questions we ask:

• Purpose — What is the purpose of this website and the business? Do you want to provide information, promote a service, sell a product, etc.?
• Goals — What do you hope to accomplish by building this website? Two of the most common goals are revenue and/or sharing information.
• Target Audience — Is there a specific group of people that will help you reach your goals? It is helpful to picture the ideal people you want to visit your website. Consider their age, sex, and interests, this helps determine the best design style for your website.
• Content — What kind of information will the target audience be looking for on your site? Are they looking for specific information, a particular product or service, online ordering, and so on?

We carefully gather the need, document, and review the initial requirements using brainstorming, mind-mapping, interviews, surveys, and prototyping.

Step 2 — Planning

Armed with the information in Step 1, we move on to the planning phase of the project. Our expert team carefully layout the site map by detailing the entire project. The site map is a list of all the main topic areas of the site as well as subtopics if applicable. This serves as a guide to what elements will be on the site like the navigation system, content, tabs, system’s functionality, contact forms, security, and performance.

As the end-users, your customers are kept in mind when designing your website. After all, they are the people who will be learning about your service or buying your product. A good user interface creates an easy to navigate website.

During the planning phase, our web designers will also help you decide what technologies should be implemented like CMS or WordPress. We outline every step to ensure success and satisfaction.

Step 3 — Designing and Development

Drawing from the information gathered up to this point, it is time to determine the look and feel of your website. The target audience is the key factor taken into consideration. For instance, a website targeted at teenagers will look much different than the one meant for a financial institution. In the designing phase, we also incorporate elements such as the company logo and color scheme to help strengthen the identity of your company on the website.

Our skilled and industry-leading design staff work to collaboratively design and create high-fidelity prototypes, functional workflow structures, diagrams to depict the visual representation of the final product.

We send you an email with the mock-ups for your website as well as give you access to a secure area of the website where you can view work in progress.

Our team communicates with you continuously so as to ensure that the final website matches your needs and taste. It is important to exchange ideas until you arrive at the final design for your website.

Then the development stage begins where the actual website is created. In this stage, our expert web designers take all of the individual graphic elements from the prototype and use them to create the actual, functional website.

This is done by first developing the home page, followed by a shell for the interior pages. The shell serves as a template for the rest of the pages, as it contains the main navigational structure for the website. Once the shell has been created, the designer takes the content and distributes it throughout the site, in the appropriate areas.

Elements such as CMS, WordPress, interactive contact forms, or e-commerce shopping carts are implemented and made functional.

Step 4 — Testing

Next, comes the testing phase where our web designers attend to the final details of your website. We go above and beyond to ensure end to end testing solutions, including functional, unit, and integration testing for the entire system as well as test last minute compatibility issues, ensuring that your website is optimized to be viewed properly in the most recent browser versions.

We check to ensure that all the code written for your website validates against industry standards and error checks. Valid code means that your site meets the current web development standards, this is helpful when checking for issues like cross-browser compatibility.

Our experts use the bottom-up approach to testing and assurance to provide a robust and valuable product. Once you give us the final approval, we are ready to launch your website.

Step 5 — Launching

We take pride in our finished work, and at this stage, we can almost guarantee that you are on your way to starting an incredible new journey with our hand-crafted product. We use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload the website to your server. We also offer domain name registration and web hosting services for your new website.

Once the accounts have been set up and your website uploaded to the server, the site is put through one last run-through. This is done to confirm that all files have been uploaded correctly and the site continues to be fully functional.

Other final details we look into include plugin installations for WordPress or other CMS driven websites and Search Engine Optimization.

In SEO, we use elements such as title, description, and keyword tags which help your website achieve higher rankings in search engines. There are a lot of details involved in optimizing your website for the search engines. This is a very important step as you now have a new website and need to make sure that people can find it.

This marks the official launch of your website, as it is now viewable to the public. We create impressive website design custom made for your business.

Step 6 — Maintenance

The last step of the web design process is not familiar to everyone. Unfortunately, a lot of clients believe that launching the website should be the end of the collaboration with the web design company. The truth is, if you are truly invested in your online presence, then the web design process is never over.

You need to keep your website in tip-top shape and our maintenance phase does that for you. We provide support and troubleshoot any issue that you or any of your user encounters during their visits in order to maintain a happy audience. Our technical support extends to periodic performance and security tests, updates, or add-on installations.

We use A/B testing to determine what changes best influence metrics such as click-through rates and conversions to maximize your website’s value.

We offer maintenance packages at reduced rates, based on how often you anticipate making changes or additions to your website.

This is all about our designing process. Now let us move on to the crafting tools used to design an impressive website for you.

Frameworks and Libraries We Use

Just like in most other professions, a web designer’s set of tools is what helps bring a concept to fruition. We are proud to use some of the most well-known and respected technologies that help us build innovative products.

Let’s take a look at some.

Laravel PHP Framework

Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework and it helps us build faster, more stable, and easy to maintain websites and web apps. It also helps make implementing authentication very simple and provides a clean, simple API.

Security vulnerabilities go hand-in-hand with the design and development of any website. Laravel PHP Framework helps us secure the websites by protecting it against the most serious security risks.

Vue.js JavaScript Framework

Vue.js is one of the most shining frameworks which give a tough competition to all frameworks. This versatile framework allows us to create a project in less time instead of spending days. By using this framework, our design team creates fantastic websites that are maintainable and testable.

Vue.js JavaScript Framework allows us to create both single page and highly complex websites as we can easily integrate smaller parts to the existing infrastructure without affecting the entire system.

Flutter Native Application Framework

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively complicated applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It has fully customizable widgets that enable us to create beautiful native interfaces in minutes.

It helps us reduce code development time as it would otherwise take a long time to adjust a small visual aspect in the layout.

Bootstrap CSS Framework

Bootstrap has revolutionized development and continues to shape how we build stuff on the web. It is extremely easy to use Bootstrap and is very adaptable too.

Every year mobile devices persist to grow hugely popular, and the requirement to have a responsive website has become compulsory and important too. As the fluid grid layout amends vigorously to the appropriate screen resolution, thus crafting a mobile-ready site is smooth and easy with Bootstrap.

WordPress

WordPress has been around since 2003 and has an intuitive interface which means adding new pages, blog posts, images, etc. on a regular basis is a breeze and can be done quickly. The code used in WordPress is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index the website’s content.

In addition to this, each page, post, and image can have its own meta tag keywords, description, and title, as well as can be optimized for specific keywords, allowing a very precise search engine optimization.

Other tools we use include, Magento, JavaScript, Node.js/NPM, Electron.js, SASS-CSS Extension Language, Webpack, Angular JS, CouchDB, and many more.

Hopefully, this overview helped you to better understand the process of website designing. So, are you ready to design or re-design your website? Then Web Guru DC is the place to get started. Schedule a call with us today.