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Having a website is a lot like having an employee working 24/7, without the extra headache of payroll. It serves as a sales rep, a promoter, and a support agent. Your website is likely the first point of contact your potential customers have with you.
When building a new website, you first you need to ask yourself a few questions:
Put yourself in your potential customer's shoes, and you'll find honest answers.
You're in bed, winding down after a long
day...
You remember you were supposed to get a
quote to clean your gutters, or some other task.
You pull out your
phone and start browsing in bed.
One search turns
into another, and very quickly, it turns into a 40
minutes adventure of distractions.
You
scroll, read a few sentences, hit back, look at
something else...
Sound familiar yet? Keep this in mind when planning your website.
Is your customer realistically going to request a quote by filling out an online form? There's a chance, but they have to be convinced it's worth their time. Plus, you have to keep their attention for more than a few seconds.
This is where the importance of your website content comes in. It gets to play the role of that helpful employee who provides that bit of personality and information to your customers. No one likes talking to confusing, automated robots on the phone - why should it be any different when it comes to a website?
Ensuring you have a good web presence should be the first step in securing the long term, realistic growth of your business.
"Good" web content comes in many forms. Here are a few examples:
All of these forms are willing to offer value before they get something in return. If your customer was right in front of you, you'd want to have a conversation with them. You don't just hand over 3 jumbled pieces of paper with a generic script, then expect them to walk to the cash register.
We usually approach web design with these steps:
So, now you have your website up and running. What's next?
Providing updates to your website keeps your content feeling fresh. Remember - you're interacting with someone out there. Keep them informed about what you're doing, and provide value to them where you can. Growing and tending to your website can also play a role in boosting page ranks on search engines, so it's a double win.
Most website updates tend to be things like text being changed, or adding a new page. Sometimes you might post an article or photo. Maybe you'll run a holiday special and need a graphic advertisement put on your homepage.
Since most updates are so small, we try to bill those in 6 minute increments, rounding up. Our hourly rate is $35/hour.
Most of these types of updates can be completed in the same business day.
Here's an example update:
You wrote a
new article and took a picture, so they need to be
put on the website. You also hired a new sales rep
named Sarah, and she needs a custom email address.
To add the article and photo, it takes us 10
minutes. To create the email address
(sarah@yourdomain.com), it
takes us 5 minutes.
Billed in 6 minute increments rounded up
(15 up to 18 minutes), you would be billed for 0.3
hours of work - or the equivalent of $10.50.
Need to register for a domain and hosting account? No problem.
All of our hosting is backed up daily. LiteSpeed Web Server w/ LSCache and KernelCare are also used to maximize website security, performance, and uptime.
We're proud to say our hosting provider has a 99.999% uptime.
If for any reason we don't maintain these standards, you can request a credit via email support@arlingtonjax.com. Be sure to include your account name along with the time of and time span of the outage. Accounts must not be past due when requesting a credit.
SEO - why is it important?
Well, think of it this way - Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and all of the others have little robots called "crawlers". Those crawlers are like little roomba vacuums. They want to suck up all of the information they can and neatly store it away. But if your "room" isn't optimized, they're going to bounce around and get confused and get stuck on a cliff or something. They miss entire sections of the room if they fall down the stairs. SEO, or search engine optimization, helps those poor robots navigate the house of the internet without falling to their doom.
By creating compelling content, networking with other websites, tagging content with keywords to describe what it is, and keeping the average website visitor in mind, you can optimize your website.
As a word of caution: be sure to steer clear of false promises that companies make about guaranteeing you a #1 spot on Google. They may use "black hat" techniques, which can damage your website's reputation - usually by spamming links and generating fake traffic. Search engines don't like that and can blacklist domains if they catch on to bad behavior. What does that mean for the fate of your 24/7 employee? Dead.
Increasing page rank and optimizing websites takes time, but it's possible with due diligence and some of the tips above.
We do basic SEO services and offer marketing strategies upon request.
Let me set another scene where you're in your potential customer's shoes:
You're on Facebook, checking out a local business. They sound really interesting, but there's a catch. Their last post was two years ago. Or, they made a really interesting post a few months ago, but all of the comments asking questions go unanswered. You try messaging them directly, but two days ago by and it's radio silence. Are they still open?
Meanwhile, on the business' side of things, they're open. They may be swamped, or they may have simply not logged into that page's account for two years because they forgot the password. Or it was managed by a former employee who no longer updates the page.
Sound familiar?
Whether you use Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, Instagram, or any other flavor of social media site, engaging with your visitors keeps that conversation going. It's one of the easiest ways to get a pulse for what your potential customers need. Interactions with a business feel more human when unique support is offered by a real human. Your 24/7 employee brought your customer in, and now it's your job to take the lead.
We offer social media management services for various platforms, and can help you decide which strategy works best for you.
What's more, we can ensure your branding is consistent across those different platforms.
Above, we mentioned that imagery should have a purpose. Creating unique graphics or editing photos is a great place to start.
Here are some of the graphics we create:
For larger projects, such as for logos, our process is similar to that of creating a new website. Only this time, we send 2-3 initial concepts to choose from. Once a concept is chosen, we generally do up to 3 sets of revisions.
Whenever we provide the final logo or other major graphic, you will be given a high resolution PNG. We also send a scalable vector file, which can be made larger without getting blurry.
Our graphic design services are billed similarly to our Website Editing (seen above), at $35/hour, billed in 6 minute increments. For logos, we prefer to use a flat rate, like for our Web Designs.
So you're ready to start your next project, what now?