Frequently Asked Questions About Website Design

Common questions our client's ask us as we start the website design and development process

How important is the design of my website?

We've all been told to make a good first impression. When a site visitor lands on your homepage or any page in your site for that matter, you have just seconds to convince them they are in the right place. Your site needs to look great and clearly convey to the visitor that...

A. The site contains the information they are looking for. Remember, your website visitors came to you to solve a problem they are having. The sooner they see that you've got the solution the more likely they will stay and explore your site. Site visitors should quickly feel comfortable that they are in the right place with visual que's like a photo or graphic. Headlines, sub-heads and body copy needs to reinforce their decision to continue to stay.

B. The information they are looking for will be easy to find. The user interface, design and layout, navigation and structure must allow visitors to navigate easily and find the product or service information they are looking for. This is often overlooked by designers trying to get cute and win awards rather than convert site visitors into customers. Remember the site you visited that was impossible to navigate? Strange shapes for buttons or hidden hotlinks that you had no idea where they went? You won’t find "creative navigation" on our web designs. Simple text for navigation is easier for your customers to follow, loads faster and it raises your rankings on search engines to boot.

C. They can easily take the next step. A clear CTA (call to action) is required to lead them to either complete a purchase or request information that will lead to a sale. What happens when your site doesn't get A, B, & C right? Site visitors hit their back button and find a site that does!

Getting those visitors to the site to begin with can be a challenge for some web developers, but BANG! has over 22 years of experience in driving traffic to websites. Our digital marketing and SEO skills make a huge difference in your bottom line. We guarantee we'll increase the number of visitors to your website after a redesign that includes our SEO services.

What does a website cost?

Since each and every website we build is customized for each client that's a difficult question to answer. We feel strongly that each of our customers deserve to have a website that is tailored to there specific needs and marketing goals. While our minimum project fee is $2,000 our average is more in the $3,000 range. Your actual goals and the features and functions built into the website will determine the dollars necessary to complete the project. Bigger and complex sites obviously require a larger budget than a simple “on-line brochure” or "lead generation" website. For most projects we will provide a free detailed estimate that will outline the tasks to be performed and the number of hours and dollars we estimate it will take to complete.

How long does it take to build a website?

Depends on the size and complexity of the site as well as our current work load. Both of these factors will affect the time required to build your website. Simple websites without SEO can take two weeks to two months, complex projects take longer and we tell client's to expect about three months start to finish. Frequently the delay is waiting on content such as text and photos from you. Having us write the copy for the website generally gets the job done faster and with higher search rankings as a bonus.

How long does it take search engines to index and rank a new website?

Remember the days of starting a new business and getting a phone number and waiting up to a year for the phone books to print the yellow pages with your number? Search engines like Google and Bing! need time to crawl and index your site and update their databases to includes your site. With our experience we've learned a few tricks to keep that process pretty short. Google, Bing! and Yahoo will normally list a site in a few weeks now. The site will likely not rank highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for keyword phrases, but can generally be found for your company name fairly quickly. Ranking on page 1 of the results can take over a year depending on several factors including...
Whether this is a redesign of an existing site with an established presence or a brand new domain

How much competition there is for your keyword phrases
How often you update the site
How quickly backlinks from other sites are built

Google seems to have a strange approach to ranking new sites. We have documented them ranking a site on the first page of the results as quickly as two months, only to have them push the site back several pages for a year. At 13 months the site popped back to page one with a #1 ranking. All without a concerted SEO effort to improve rankings. Google seems to favor older domains, seemingly penalizing newly registered domains. While the number of inbound links to a site affects the rankings, these delays seem to go over and above that. In the industry there is much discussion about whether or not a Google Sandbox exists that delays sites from getting top rankings quickly.

For client's wanting quick results we suggest using an existing domain name and implementing a monthly SEO Campaign that adds fresh content to the site on a weekly basis and a steady progression of building backlinks to the site from relevant and high authority sites. This is a proven strategy that has worked extremely well for our clients.

Is there an annual fee for having a website?

Yes, there is an annual fee for the hosting of your website. Website hosting is best compared to telephone service. You pay AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. so when a person calls your number, your phone rings and connects the call.

Website hosting is similar... when a prospective site visitor conducts a search at Google or Bing, and clicks on a search result, or even types your website address directly into their Web browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) we connect the site visitor to our Web servers where we present the requested page to them. Your annual hosting fee also pays for nightly off-site backups of the site, reports of visitors to your site, storage space (in Gigabytes) the site uses on the server and the monthly bandwidth (Internet traffic) all those visits to the site uses.

How do I know if I've had site visitors looking at my website?

We have two different website analytics or reports packages that we use. One runs reports monthly, the other one daily. We take a slightly different approach than Google analytics in that we look at the actual logs from the web server (that record every visitor to the site and which pages they view, where they came from, etc.) and produce a detailed HTML report (apx. 40 pages) of the sites activity. We prefer this approach for two reasons...

It's more accurate as everything gets logged vs using the javascript calls Google analytics uses
It doesn't hurt the sites performance. Google analytics makes a separate call out to Google every time a page is loaded. With our reporting we run reporting after hours when it won't slow down the website.

Reporting includes the number of both normal (people) visitors as wells as search spiders and bots, the pages that were viewed, which order the pages were most commonly viewed in (paths the site visitor took through the site), and where that traffic came from (referrers). The monthly reports can be accessed directly through your website and we e-mail you a zipped copy of them on the first of the month. The daily reports are accessed through a different server and can be viewed at anytime.

Have other questions about our services? Contact us here or call us at (520) 230-2322.