Starting something new! Going to start doing weekly VLOGs about what the goals are for this week to grow my website design business, and holding myself accountable. Scroll down to see the recap for how I did! Goals for the Week of Oct. 7th, 2018 Focus: Sales Funnels Website Repair Website Updates Website Maintenance Run Facebook Ads to each funnel Take care! Wendy __________ How did I do? Coming soon on Oct. 14th, 2018
Day in the Life of a Web Designer Mom Goal Outline: Week of Oct. 7th, 2018
Privacy Policies are important, even though they are generally pretty boring. They legally protect your derriere, but also provide a sense of ease to those who actually read them. They know exactly what they are getting with your site. Same goes with "Terms of Service" - our next blog post. We're updating ours so we thought it was a good time to post some good resources if you are trying to do the same. The BBB, Better Business Bureau (an old client of ours! - East Coast chapter), actually put out a template we use ourselves. Templates are great because they cover the legal bases while keeping you from going nuts. Of course you DO have to put in your customizations mad-lib style, but also read it through once or twice to make sure it actually does say you do what you really do. They even have some "optional" add-ons for things like cookies, shopping carts, etc. It's all copy/paste, and is a really good template for a place to start. Just remember, this is your business, so even though the template is handy, be thorough and make sure it's not making any promises you aren't intending to keep. AND [...]
So! You may be browsing our site (or many other web design agencies) and wondering why we list services, but not prices. Are we THAT expensive?! No, no we are not. We are very competitive for a professionally designed customized website in Virginia's DC Metro area. So, why no prices? The reason we don't list our prices is because in our world offering a base price can become very misleading for the customer - and that's dangerous. For example, if I were to offer you a custom website for $750 with a 2-day turnaround, you could probably expect a basic template with your text/content plugged in, no more than 4-6 pages, and limited choice in what you could revise, if anything at all. And for some businesses, that's all they need. But if you're going to do that, I would steer you towards Wix or SquareSpace. If that's all you're after, then you are better off trying to do it on your own because what you likely need is not going to be a custom website. How much is a Custom Website Design in Fredericksburg? That's a pretty tricky question to answer, and I can give you [...]
How does consistency make you money as a website designer? What about as a small business who has hired a website designer? It comes down to recognizing what consistency does for you. How it builds your brand, how it establishes your business, how you can use it as a tool, and how you can use it to save yourself time and money. You establish the rules for how your brand should appear, what fonts to use, what styles to use, what logos, colors, and layout types to use. Does your company utilize white space? What about curvy fonts vs a plain sans-serif font? Does your designer know about these choices? Developing your brand using consistency is what makes a great product. It doesn’t matter if it’s a website design here in Fredericksburg or a street ad on a billboard in Northern Virginia. If you develop what’s called a style guide, a set of rules for your branding choices for your business (color palettes, fonts, spacing, etc.) you can then take that to your designer, or DIY it, and create something customers will recognize it. And a style guide will not cement you into using a design [...]
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. […]