Why are website designers so expensive? Why do web design agencies charge so much? It boils down to the sheer number of skills required, the training, and the vast experience necessary to orchestrate a site from start to finish in a clean and productive way. […]
What is a Web Designer? What does a web designer do exactly? A web designer is someone that has many hats throughout the whole website development process. They begin by taking the notes that they (or the sales person) has collected from the discovery meeting – if you’re hiring someone you want the designer there, NOT the sales person. Trust me on this one – so much information gets lost playing telephone from the liason to the designer it’s not even funny. And from those notes the designer’s job is to take the style and essence of the company and develop a style for the website itself. But before colors, fonts, and styles can come into play, they must first create a wireframe. […]
Ah the UX Designer, the right hand of the website designer. They keep us in check for sure, but also ensure a fantastic experience for the site’s visitors. A UX designer, or user experience designer, is there specifically to make sure the end user enjoys using the site. So what does that mean exactly? It means that they are responsible for taking sure the user gets to where they are likely trying to go on the site smoothly. They check user groups and statistical data to make sure website elements are useful on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. They make sure that when a customer visits a product page that the specs they need are not hidden, that the Contact page has actually useful information on it – they make sure the site functions in the best possible way for your specific type of customer. […]
QA, or the quality assurance team, is like the saving grace of the entire web team. Their role is vital, because what they do is review what the customer sends, and also what the rest of the web team produces to ensure an awesome end product - in other words, a phenomenal site. They do more than just check grammar. Their job as editors is to find inconsistencies across designs and site functionalities. For example, in a site of 500 pages half have blue buttons, but somewhere along the line we switched to teal ones. They then put in a request to the web designers and developers to change the other half to the new teal version. They check the content the client provides before it ever reaches the designers, developers, or web editors. Then once the page is about to go live, or is live, they check it again to ensure nothing weird happened from point A to point B. And believe me, they are good at their jobs. A good QA person will find an extra space in a headline, double periods at the end of a paragraph, links that don’t work or go to the wrong places, [...]
What does an SEO Copywriter, a website copywriter, do? Magic – that’s what! Seriously, they have it rough and are completely worth the money. It doesn’t matter how well a site is designed, or how great the coding is, if it can’t be found on Google, what good it? A SEO Copywriter is responsible for taking information the client gives them, even if it’s just bullet points, and turning it into actionable text. This can be text for anything from page introductions, product summaries, to full About pages and landing pages with direct calls to action (CTAs). The twist is of course making that copy not only readable by humans, but having it play well with the Google machine as well. […]
Just a quick post to celebrate that we have landed our very first website customer here in local Fredericksburg, VA. We have been around since 2008, but in the DC Metro area, and this is our first customer actually located in Fredericksburg, and it's a wonderful thing. It's a lovely search engine marketing (SEM) story of optimizing our own site for "sem fredericksburg," and slowly watching that long-tail keyword metric drift from page 3, to page 2, and finally to the holy grail Page 1 of Google. We're holding our heads high at #2!! And more keywords are only going to improve as we add more valuable and localized content to the site. We're constantly improving the site and really appreciate the progress we've seen. SEO is a great game of matching wits against the Google machine, and pairing that with SEM (search engine marketing) we're putting to work the methods we use for our clients for ourselves (finally!). No more cobbler's children have no shoes syndrome! So we just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to our new local Fredericksburg client - Uncle Tom's Antiques, for allowing us to fix up your site's interior code, updating [...]
Registering my web design business with Stafford County was at once more complicated than I would have thought, and easier than I would have thought. This is my experience of what I had to do to register/license (though they don’t do licenses) with the county for my Fredericksburg-based business. What I Had to Do First things first – I had to do all of it in person. I know! I was all over Stafford’s website, on the phone, and even had some email back and forth with their very lovely representatives (I mean that sincerely! They were extremely kind and helpful!), but at the end of the day they want a person to come down there and take care of setting up a business in Stafford County in-person. The part that I hated, was I had to do it during the work day. There are no weekend hours or even after hours when it comes to registering your business. The lady I first spoke with said she envisioned it taking an hour, well, it was closer to 2, but that’s still not bad for all I had to do! And – it was a lot. I was moving most of [...]
Finding a Marketing Company in Fredericksburg, VA doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, marketing with a localized focus is actually a much easier process because you already have the following going for you: Obvious localized keywords A smaller niche market of very specific people You can employ ultra specific marketing techniques due to the specific targeting Lower advertising costs – because the target market is smaller, there’s less advertising wasted on people who aren’t your true target audience […]
Computers can slow down over time, and the best thing to do as designers (or general users) is to keep the darn things in good shape. This means cleaning up your digital work area just as you would your desk. This video talks about the main areas you need to keep tidy as a web designer: These areas include: Cleaning up your Adobe apps Uninstall other unused programs Unsync Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive folders you no longer use. They'll stay on your account, so you will effectively have archived them. Then remove them once all is safe. Get to Inbox zero (if possible) and empty your trash. Run defrag on your machine. If you have security software, run the full scans you always put off. Cleaning up Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) Apps Simply uninstall whatever program you're not using at the moment (i.e. Illustrator) using the Adobe CC app interface. It takes moments to install or uninstall even the largest programs, and it won’t delete your files. The only thing being removed is the program itself. It will disassociate your files (meaning if you double click a file it won’t know what to open it with), but as [...]
Thought I'd share something that was driving me nuts! I am a constant user of Google Calendar, and I went to visit the website Calendars That Work one time, and because they both begin with "Cal" I was forever doomed to the autofill on Google's Quick Search (where it prefills in the text) to defaulting to CalendarsThatWork.com. It. was. driving. me. nuts. So! I found the solution. Hit up Google Chrome's 3 vertical dots on the right, click on History, then History again. It'll pop open a tab. From that tab find the offending website. Click that website's three dots on the right and click "Remove from History." It's a glorious thing. :D No more getting the wrong site when I quick type in "Cal" into the URL line. I also made a video below! Check us out over at YouTube for more web work hacks. Take care! Wendy