Your website is your most valuable business asset. To thrive, you need a website that's much more than attractive, quick, and mobile friendly. In order to grow traffic and convert sales leads, you need strong SEO, an excellent, content strategy, and conversion paths for each of your ideal customer types. You need effective landing pages, lean code, and brilliant copy.
At Graphos, we know how to do all those things. We’re a cohesive team of digital marketing strategists, brand experts, content authors, graphic designers, web developers and advertising professionals.
You may not care about our 120-point website deployment checklist, or that we prototype every website we build. But you’ll appreciate the reliability and sales-oriented results that come from our detailed and time-proven methodologies.
Great web design is built in harmony with a strategy for content and SEO, so a site that is well optimized for search should not be painful to read. In fact, search engines like Google have become smart enough to tell when content is written for the user’s benefit rather than stuffed with keywords in an attempt to rank highly on the search engine results pages. Writing content for web is an art form, and requires balancing the audience’s needs with the keyword density search engines are looking for, and making it all feel natural. Reader-friendly SEO is a job for professionals, and not a strong suit for the majority of Edmonton web design companies.
Yes — and that is exactly why. Our analytics and heatmap data confirm that most website visitors scan page content super quickly, gathering the bits and pieces they’re looking for, especially on a cursory visit while comparing options in the Exploration stage. We also know some will come back and read more critically during the Evaluation and Decision stages. In all cases, the content should be carefully thought out to provide each of your buyer personas with the information they need at every stage of the sales cycle. Great web design includes a solid content strategy based on an understanding of all your ideal buyer types, their goals, and their behaviour patterns.
Wireframes are schematic drawings created in planning a website or app. Our web design process begins with what we call a “grey box prototype” which is exactly what it sounds like: a functioning prototype of the website structure, built from uniform grey boxes. The goal is to plan a place for all the important structural elements, without the distraction of colours, font styles or web copy. Prototyping takes a little more time upfront, but can avoid costly surprises later on in the web design and development processes.
Web design and development, done right, is pretty complicated. We’re blending functional marketing (usually tailored to multiple audiences), branding, user experience, content strategy and custom functionality, in a one-of-a-kind design. In the end, the investment is in having a tool that attracts new visitors, engages them, and converts them into qualified sales leads.
Our Four-D process is designed to achieve all of this as predictably as possible, while giving you a beautifully branded, results-oriented website, as quickly as possible.
Discovery: We learn as much as we can about your business, its ideal customers and how the sales process works by talking to the subject matter experts.
Design: We create our grey-box prototype and plan the website’s content strategy, and begin writing search-optimized content for the new website. Our designers work on the visual elements and user interface for all device types, with deep consideration on building a visual language and logical functionality around your brand.
Development: This is where our developers start writing code for the entire website, based on what we’ve learned from the discovery process and the approved interface designs. We test everything thoroughly to make sure it works perfectly on all targeted platforms and devices.
Deployment: Our detailed Website Deployment Plan is a checklist to make sure over a hundred individual tasks have been completed and all pieces are where they belong. This includes things like ensuring the new website is made visible to search engines, that your favicon (the mini logo that appears next to your URL) is in place, all redirects from your old site structure are working, and there are no surprises after launch. Although a few other Edmonton web design companies may create deployment plans and some form of checklists, ours is among the most detailed!
A conversion path is how marketers envision your website visitors making their way into paying customers. In our Discovery process, we identify all of your ideal customer types, sometimes called “buyer personas.” Then we design a unique conversion path for each one of them. The conversion path for any of your personas might be different at specific stages within their buyer’s journey, so we plan conversion paths for each persona at the Exploration stage, Evaluation stage and Decision stage.
Yes you can—at least in terms of initial investment. A template or pre-built theme can be used to pop up a quick and even attractive web presence. Of course, it will be missing all the elements of content and marketing strategies, and your visual identity will simply be dropped into place.
When you repurpose a theme on a platform like WordPress, Squarespace or WIX, it is nearly impossible to implement conversion paths, much less design a user experience around your brand. In most cases you’ll inherit a large collection of third-party plugins, each of which is a potential attack vector for hackers. Theme-based websites can suffice for bootstrapped startup businesses or when budget is tight. Some Edmonton web design firms are equipped to repurpose themes and templates, which can be suitable to lower budgets and expectations. At Graphos we’re here to create custom, marketing-driven websites for brands that intend to dominate their industry.
Because everything we do is custom work, it really depends. We always create a Statement of Work before beginning, in which we outline our objectives, measures of success, deliverables, timeframe and all functionality. (We don’t think any other Edmonton web design company goes to quite as much detail.) Custom web design projects with content strategy start at about $15,000.
Try our online price estimator to get a feel for what it would cost for us to plan, design and develop a project like yours.
Then come talk to us. There’s no obligation, you are sure to learn a few things, and we’ll provide refreshments!