Website Development

A website is often the first impression your business or organization will make on prospective customers, clients, or donors - and it's a make-it-or-break-it moment.  To be effective, your site must: be easy to find and easy to use; engage the user with content that speaks to their needs; and include clear messaging with strong calls to action to accomplish your goals.  

Does your website have all of these qualities?  Is your site also easy for you to manage and update?  Do you even have a website yet?  If your answer to any of these was "no," read on...

Build a Better Website with:

Website Design & Development

Building and maintaining a website is a lot easier today than it was even a few years ago, thanks to Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.  These platforms allow website administrators to manage and update their content without having to know any code.  They also allow groups of people to manage a website collectively, with each person having "permissions" to access their own area of the site.  The result is a website that can be managed by its owner quickly, easily and without the additional cost of depending on a programmer for every small change.  

Design & Development Services:

• Site development in Joomla, WordPress or Drupal CMS
• Custom site design or existing template customization
• CMS training for do-it-yourself site updates
• Full site management for a hands-off approach
• Analytics integration and reporting to measure and respond to your site's performance

 Website Content Strategy & Copywriting

The mechanics of building a website are only one half of the formula that equals a highly effective site that can achieve your goals - and not even the most important half, at that.  The critical piece of the puzzle is to have a content strategy - a plan for organizing and creating your site's content in a way that will best communicate your messages, achieve your goals and engage your users.  

Content strategy is both an art and a science.  It requires a thorough understanding of both your own business goals and the mindset of your users; an understanding of best practices for website usability and user experience; and the ability to create content in a way that speaks to all those needs.   Content strategy should never be overlooked; without it, your website simply will not be fully effective.  

Content Strategy Services:

• Analysis of existing site content
• Consulting - identify target audiences, develop key messages, determine site goals
• Development of site architecture and page-level content strategy
• Copywriting of textual content and development of graphic and interactive content

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

If your website is hard to find, the best design and content in the world will be useless.  Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving a website's visibility in "organic" (versus advertised or paid-for) search engine results.  By researching and incorporating important keywords relevant to your business, organizing your site's content in a certain way (part of content strategy, listed above), incorporating social media to encourage in-bound links and social activity around your site, and employing a variety of other tactics, you can improve your rankings in search engines and lead to significantly more traffic to your site.

Because it relies heavily on integrating keywords and structuring the site in a specified way, SEO is best done while building (or rebuidling) a site, in tandem with content strategy.  But if your site has poor search engine performance, it's worth the investment to rework the site with SEO in mind.

SEO Services:

• Analysis of existing site peformance
• Keyword research
• Consulting - site restructuring and keyword integration; social media integration