Marketing Driven Websites
Our AIM System emphasizes the core pillars of business growth: Attracting, Improving and Momentum. Making a website that acts as a sales funnel, brings results, and pays for itself, is one of our primary goals. But fundamentally, our websites are different: they are measured by their ability to generate value for your business.
WordPress as a Content Management System
At Merkados we build all of our websites with WordPress. WordPresss is an open source project with thousands of developers that work on the platform. Inherently, having a WordPress website is less risky for your organization. Your website is also more secure because a large community is constantly working on new security releases.
WordPress is also much more customizable. With SquareSpace, WIX or other builders, you are limited to the templates they provide and you are married to their platform for as long as you want to keep your site. With a WordPress, we can customize your site to look exactly how we want it to. And most importantly, your website will communicate the same archetypes of your brand. It will have the same tone, voice and style of your brand. Those things are difficult to accomplish within the context of a limited-template. Also, your website is yours to keep. If you are not happy for whatever reason, you can move your website to another provider without having to start from scratch.
By utilizing WordPress, we also take advantage of other developer’s work and stop re-inventing the wheel. There is a repository of 60K free plugins and thousands of paid plugins that allow adding functionality to your site without having to code things from scratch. Making it possible and more affordable to have new functionality. SquareSpace for example, doesn’t allow any custom server-side code at all: you are a lot more limited in what custom functionality you can build into your website.
Clearly Wix and SquareSpace have their own place and are valuable for starting businesses with limited budgets. But when you need a more nuanced approach to your web presence, you need to have more control.
Performance-optimized Environment
In today’s Internet environment, speed and ease of use are crucial. At Merkados, we make your website fast and responsive. By optimizing your environment, we can improve the performance of your website and make it more efficient. This can help you provide a better user experience for your visitors and improve your website’s ranking in search engines. When it comes to experience online a few seconds of wait time can make a big difference.
Search Engine Friendly
Attracting new prospects to your brand online is not easy, the web is an ever-growing place with billions of websites. Having a search-engine friendly website and a digital marketing system in place is the only way to attract more and better prospects and take your business to the next level. A website is a valuable tool for any business, but it is not enough on its own. A digital marketing plan is essential to help businesses reach their target audiences online. A digital marketing plan includes strategies like:
- Search engine optimization,
- Pay-per-click advertising,
- and email marketing.
These strategies help businesses, like yours, reach more people online and can result in more website visitors, leads, and sales.
In house, award-winning design.
Aesthetics are incredibly important. Your corporate branding will reflect the values of your business and allows you to compound your messaging instead of just adding efforts. Aesthetics are critical when it comes to websites and brand recognition because they are the first thing that people see. If a website is not visually appealing, people are not going to stick around to see what else the website has to offer. The same is true for brands. If a brand does not have a visually appealing logo or design, people are not going to be drawn to it.
Custom WordPress PHP coding.
There are times when plugins, as good as they are, won’t serve your needs. That’s when you need custom WordPress coding. At Merkados we use a combination of PHP and MySQL for back-end programming with Javascript for front-end in order to develop new functionality. If your business needs custom functionality we provide in-house development in order to provide your business with a competitive advantage.
Responsive, Multi-browser standard compliance.
In most industries, your website will be visited much more by mobile devices than by desktop browsers. It is important to design your site with mobile users in mind. But websites are now presented in a multitude of browsers and screen dimensions, you want your website to display properly for your users no matter the device they choose. This is what we refer to as “Responsive Design.” You want to make sure that your users, no matter the device or screen size, have the best experience with your website.
Custom digital media production.
Stock photography can be a good complement to custom photography and video. But by itself, it just can’t make you stand out from the crowd. At Merkados we utilize the best available technologies, including AI models, to leverage the visual impact of your business imagery. We can enhance your current photos, we can modify them, and we can create new images, all while preserving the voice, tone and style of your branding.
Also, video has become a decisive factor that your audience will use to decide who to trust. If you are interested in incorporating high quality video into your communication efforts, we have what you need. With some industry leading video automation routines, we can assist your business in ways no one else can.
Bilingual English/Spanish
There is not questioning that the Hispanic population is growing in the United States. Big companies are already investing in presenting their content in both English and Spanish and it makes sense in terms of potential market acquisition. According to the Pew Research Center, the Hispanic population in the United States is projected to grow more than 50% by 2060, from 57 million in 2016 to 115 million. This growth is due to both immigration and births. Hispanics are the nation’s second-largest racial or ethnic group, after whites. In 2016, they accounted for 18% of the U.S. population. The U.S. Hispanic population is diverse, with origins in more than 20 countries. The largest origin group is Mexico, followed by Central America and the Caribbean. If you can serve the Hispanic market with your products or services, it is very likely that you should have a website that addresses their needs in their own language.
Merkados is a fully bilingual agency. Allowing your business to communicate clearly and with the proper cultural differences that traditional online translators can’t match.
