Why is website design important for your small business?
Small businesses need professional website design and development for many reasons. Some of them include: making a lasting impression in your audience, providing information, sharing your business communication in a way that you control and providing value to your clients in a digital way.
Your website is like your digital storefront, and it is often the first point of contact for many of your potential customers. Just as a brick-and-mortar storefront must be well-maintained and attractive to draw in customers, your website must be expertly crafted and maintained to make a positive impression.
Merkados™ will ensure that your website is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also user-friendly, device responsive and optimized for the major search engines.
A professional website is a digital representation of your brand and can be a powerful tool in attracting and retaining customers. A poorly designed website, on the other hand, can be a major hindrance to your success, just as a faulty machine can slow down production.
If your website is difficult to navigate or slow to load will drive away your potential audience, just as a machine that is slow or unreliable will decrease your chances of succeeding. Investing in a professional website is not only wise, but also essential for the success of your small business in the era where almost every person carries the Internet on their pocket.
What makes a Merkados™ website unique?
You may find hundreds of possibilities when looking to design a new website. From free template offers, to very inexpensive templates that you create yourself, to high end agencies that assign different team members for different parts of your site.
So how do you know what is the best way forward?
At Merkados™ we believe that for website development to make sense for small business owners, it must produce a positive ROI. In today’s economy, you must be careful about your investments and how they reflect on your bottom line. In order for us to deliver a positive ROI for our website projects, we keep our costs low and we pack all of our more than 20 years of expertise creating websites that work.
Here are some of the things that we do differently:
- Our websites are designed by an in-house professional website designer.
- Our websites are developed with WordPress and Elementor.
- We offer bilingual English and Spanish web development.
- Our websites are revised for speed, usability, responsiveness and conversion performance.
- We don’t design your website and expect you to make it successful on your own. Instead, we assist you with your digital marketing, making it our mission to see you succeed online.
Things that small business owners should consider when investing on a new website
There are plenty of options for getting a new website, but here are some important considerations if you are a small business owner looking to redesign your site:
Branding: Your website should accurately reflect your brand and communicate your unique value proposition to your potential customers. There are millions or websites out there and your only chance of rising through the clutter is use powerful branding. Making your business memorable is a must. And your website should reflect the voice, tone and style of your brand.
User Experience: Your website should be easy to navigate, fast-loading, have clear calls-to-action(CTAs) and provide a positive user experience. Merkados™ will be able to provide guidance on how to make your website user-friendly and accessible to your visitors. Most importantly, we will measure the performance of your site over time and improve it, making sure that your audience’s behavior is the one directing our actions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Your website should be optimized for search engines to increase its visibility and attract organic traffic. We will help you implement best practices for SEO, onsite and offsite.
Mobile Optimization: More than half of all website traffic now comes from mobile devices, so it is important that your website is optimized for mobile viewing. Merkados™ will create a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and different browsers.
Content Management System (CMS): A CMS is a platform that allows you to manage and update your website content easily. Merkados™ will design your website on WordPress, the most popular and widely-used CMS in the world. With unlimited users, roles and plenty of administration power, you can update your website easily and keep it fresh and up-to-date.
Types of Websites
Websites come in different forms. A WIX website doesn’t necessarily have the same functionality than a static HTML website or a WordPress website. And so, it is important to learn about the most common types of websites so that you decide what kind best fits your needs.
Custom Design vs Customized Template
A custom designed website is a website that starts as a drawing. The drawing will take into consideration things like sections, branding, communication goals and business objectives. After the drawing is converted to a digital file, it is then refined to look very similar to what it would look once it is live on the internet. However, each page will have to be separated into components that make up a real web page: graphics, content, scripts, styles and HTML markup. This process is referred to as “slicing.”
Once the slicing is complete, we put each piece together again creating HTML and CSS files and connecting each page into a complete system of templates that we call a theme. The theme will contain a homepage template, a secondary page template, a single post page template, an archive page template and others.
Once the theme is complete it is time to incorporate the theme into WordPress Content Management System. WordPress will drive the content administration of your new website. At this stage we add the content to the different pages and when ready, we push the website live on the Internet.
A customized template on the other hand starts from a “theme” that has already been created. Often times organizations have very similar goals and their business objectives call for a very basic website, for example a brochure website. In these cases, using a theme that has already been designed and put together saves time and money.
Responsive and SEO-Friendly
It is important to know that no matter if you opt for a custom design or for a customized template you always want to end up with a website that is both responsive and seo-friendly. A responsive website is one that adapts to the different sizes of screens such as desktops, tablets and phones. On the other hand, SEO-friendly refers to the ability of a website to be crawled, indexed and ranked properly by search engine robots. It is clear that you want your content to be properly read by search engine crawlers or otherwise your website will lack any search engine visibility.
Samples of Merkados Websites
How long does it take to complete a website?
Websites are often times also divided into three categories depending on their complexity:
- Informational
- Interactional
- Transactional
Informational websites are what we normally call a “brochure” website. It is intended to provide information to your clients. It is the most basic form of website.
The interactional website not only provides information but also collects information from your users. The most common form of this collection happens either explicitly or implicitly. Explicitly by way of forms that submit information to your database. Implicitly in the form of Analytics or data captured while your users use the website or applications.
Finally the third possible type of website is the transactional. Transactional websites provide a way to sell something directly to your users. It can be a simple button that allows people to pay for a product or a fully developed cart or a web app that features custom functionality and offers a membership structure.
Depending on the type of website you are looking at a longer time to complete.
For a simple informational or interactional website with a customized template approach you are looking at about three to four weeks to completion. With a custom website design, you should expect an additional two weeks to complete.
For a more complex transactional website, it will depend on the complexity of the functionality that you want to implement. But you can expect a minimum of six weeks to completion.
Supporting the website after going live
At Merkados we believe that it is our responsibility to maintain and promote your digital presence rather that designing a website and then dropping that responsibility on your organization.
Websites need constant administration, updating of code and content on the regular basis, backups, hosting and promotion to be successful.
We will provide you with all the necessary support that you’ll need to make your web property all that it needs to be to reach your objectives. From hourly webmaster services to a more comprehensive digital marketing approach such as our AIM System, we will discuss all options with you so that you can make the best decision for your organization.
Technologies used on our websites
At Merkados we use a variety of technologies to maximize the value that our websites bring to our clients.
Some of our technologies include:
- WordPress: An open source content management system
- LAMP server: A Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP approach to hosting.
- Analytics packages including some proprietary software and some commercial packages like Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity.
- Elementor Pro: Website Builder.
- Proprietary and commercial AI tools including: LunnaFox, ChatGPT and others.
- And many more.
Contact Merkados™ today!
If you are ready to take advantage of the best digital marketing strategies and design a new website, contact Merkados™ today!