We know that building a website is an essential part of every business’s reality – but that’s already history. Today, websites are no longer static brochures that you just stick up online or to keep appearances. On the contrary, they are dynamic power engines where all the action happens. Websites now lead the sales team by generating leads for them. It is a huge channel to every marketer where they need to create content for, come up with email marketing campaigns, keep an eye on its SEO performance, conversions, and other KPIs. Websites also lead the customer service department as they become the first communication channel a customer may think of. That’s not even everything a website can do.
We love to empower local Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Bangor to unlock that potential of having a living and breathing website that helps you achieve your business objectives. In this article, we will cover some important definitions such as web design, web development, web hosting, and web maintenance and how you can benefit from these services as an SME in Bangor. Let’s dive in!
Are You Looking for ‘Web Design Bangor’?
ProfileTree – Expert Web Designers and Developers with a Local Flavour Serving Businesses in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland
We are a self-made, family run agency based in Belfast and Monaghan. We’ve established ourselves in the Northern Irish market since 2010. We’ve grown the team, collected awards, and helped local and international businesses with building top-notch websites. We’ve also helped hundreds of small and medium sized businesses with free web design and development training through programmes funded by Northern Ireland’s Councils over the course of three years. Investing in building a website for your business in Bangor means making sure your new website partnership is built on proven methods. We’re also SEO specialists and a leading content marketing agency, so not only can we help with building a website, but also help you get traffic for that website.
Web Design Bangor: What Is Web Design
Creating and maintaining a website is more complex and involves an entire ecosystem of roles and skill sets. That’s why it’s good to identify what each service involves and what it means to your business. Creating and maintaining a website is complex and involves an entire ecosystem of roles and skill sets.
But to make that easier, let’s separate website creation into two categories: what the users sees, and what the user doesn’t see. What the user sees takes place in a browser and involves design and front-end development. Design defines a website’s colors, layout, font, and images – all the stuff that goes into a website’s branding and usability – and requires tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, for instance.
Web Design Bangor: Web Design VS Web Development
Web design and development are interrelated. That’s why, if you’re on a mission to build a new website, it serves you well to understand what these refer to. Web design determines the look and feel of a website, not only in terms of aesthetics, but the structure and mapping of the website’s content and visitor journey. On the hand, web development determines how the website functions, that involves the features, the coding, and the web performance. Because there isn’t always a hard line that separates the two domains, the titles are often used interchangeably. As the web continues to evolve, so do the roles. Let’s dive into what every domain involves.
Web Design Bangor: Elements of Web Design
Web Design Bangor: Layout
The layout is the arrangement of a website’s header, navigation menu, footer, content, and graphics. Of course, every website and industry have different standards or to put it clearer ‘areas of focus’ that the website should highlight. Some websites focus on the services, others focus on products. Sometimes the focus is content, other times it’s the visuals. The choice of where everything is placed on your website is part of the web design phase. This affects the user experience hugely because the site map, the assortment of products, services, etc. should be placed with making it as easy as possible for the visitor to find what they’re looking for, according to matters the most for them.
Web Design Bangor: Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy means determining which aesthetic aspects of the website should stand out using size, color, spacing, and more. Knowing that it only takes 2.6 seconds for eyes to settle on key areas of a web page, your visitors need to access key information by glancing at your homepage. This is why visual hierarchy is a tough mission. First impressions are 94% design related. For first impressions, visual appeal even beats usability. A positive first impression can increase overall satisfaction. Part of that appeal is creating a visual hierarchy that communicates your messages in a way that captures the attention of your audience.
On top of that, visual hierarchy is also important for SEO because it’s the way that Google understands the formatting of your content – and more importantly target keywords – based on that hierarchy. Therefore, your headings and titles should be in line with your target keywords and their priority to you as a business.
Web Design Bangor: Accessibility
Accessibility means creating a website that provides a good experience for everyone, regardless of how they access the internet. To be more specific, there is technical accessibility like device and browser accessibility and there’s also human accessibility. The latter means designing inclusive websites that people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed can use and navigate easily. Accessibility is an important element of design. You need to design with all the different devices, browsers, and visitors in mind.
Web Design Bangor: Navigation
Navigation helps a user get from point A to point B using navigational tools like site architecture, menus, and search bars. Simple, effective navigation helps users find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily. That has a huge impact on the user experience because nobody will click four clicks and wait for four pages to load to get the piece of information they’re looking for. So, a good web designer will recommend the best navigation experience to make all your pages easy to find.
Web Design Bangor: Colour, Graphics, and Branding
Intentionally, we put this as the last element of design because people often assume that this is all there is to web design – which is far from true. Colour, graphics, and branding are what give a website its personality and breathes life into it. Those three concepts are what we call ‘the look and feel’ of the website which might be determined by a brand’s existing identity or by the content of the website.
Web Design Bangor: Web Development Elements
So while web design focuses on the visuals of a website, web development works on bringing those visuals to life. They’ll use different programming languages, like HTML, PHP, and Java, to develop a website’s core functionality.
Functionality might be things like what happens when someone clicks a button or how the main navigation loads when a user scrolls or clicks on it. So, any feature on any website, no matter how big or small, is built by a developer. In addition to functionality, security and maintenance of a website are also part of the web development domain.
Web Design Bangor: What Is Web Hosting and Maintenance
Web hosting enables you to publish your website or web application on the internet. When you sign up for a web hosting service, you basically rent some space on a physical server where you can store all the files and data necessary for your website to work properly. Think of it as a storage for your web pages and data. That storage needs someone to look after the data, secure it, and fix it up in case any issues arise like hacking or crashing.
The maintenance of a website means ensuring that it’s functioning the way it’s intended to. Maintenance includes access management, malware detection, automated backups, and plugin updates. That’s why 24/7 customer or technical support comes in handy if your website encounters unexpected lags, crashes, or even security breaches.
Web Design Bangor: ProfileTree’s Approach
Succeeding in the online world means providing your valued users with responsive web design, holding their attention on your site for longer, driving increased engagement and sale conversions. Across each stage of the web design process, we ensure our project’s success by subjecting them to the most stringent usability tests, informed by the latest findings in UX research.
We believe that in today’s digital marketplace, our buying decisions are being increasingly driven by our online browsing experiences. The experience of your customers using your website can make that crucial difference between a one-time visit and a lasting, profitable relationship. We bring together a multi-faceted team incorporating the very best practices in SEO, ensuring that your branded messages rank in the world’s most important search engine result pages, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Entrust us for your web design project while you run your business – it’s what we do.
Web Design Bangor: Why Choose ProfileTree?
We love helping local businesses, like yours, grow through great website design. How? By combining our local know-how with digital expertise covering web, content marketing, SEO, video production, and more. This means we take a ‘bigger picture’ view of your company’s online presence to make sure the right results are built into the foundations of your website.
We’re proud to say we know a thing or two about developing great working relationships with clients. Why? Our repeat customers – from Bangor, North Down, across Northern Ireland and beyond – trust us to not just work on their initial web design but to help keep their business ahead of the latest changes in website design, social media expertise and content marketing.
What have we discovered about forming a great working partnership with local companies? The importance of listening more than we talk, adapting to the customer’s needs and using a transparent approach to create lasting trust.
Web Design Bangor: Our Customer Service Code of Conduct
Web Design Bangor: Listening Well
The right site for your business means the right website design for your business goals. Listening to our customers means understanding those goals, how they fit in with your marketing plans and what a website needs to achieve. Taking time to get a clear picture of your strategies at the start means a site designed to be a genuine, living asset to your company.
Web Design Bangor: Putting You First
An ‘off the peg’ solution to your business needs might be easier to produce, but if the right results won’t be produced, we won’t want to put our name to it. We’ve made sure we think about what our customers need now, and in the future, to deliver a web design that lasts. For example, a company website with a content management system (CMS) that’s too cumbersome to use or a product detail you’ll find too time-consulting to update isn’t the right solution.
Web Design Bangor: Trust Through Integrity
We’ve developed a system of absolute transparency with our customers, whether they’re in Bangor or elsewhere in Northern Ireland or beyond, to help build a lasting relationship. We can show our customers every minute of the time spent by our team on their project, we don’t do ‘meetings about meetings’ and we keep our clients updated on their project. Working with an agency can be rewarding and effective with this approach.
ProfileTree’s Web Design and Development Services
We develop highly intuitive, optimised, conversion-focused websites that sell your products and services, so you don’t have to. Websites are the lynchpin of your digital marketing strategy; without a good website, every other marketing activity will fall flat. Why? Because customers expect your website to be easy to find, responsive, on-brand, smooth to navigate and quick to load. If you don’t tick all these boxes, your potential customers will get frustrated and leave your site and go to your competitors instead.
We’ve experience with building websites since 2010, we have a wide range of experience using Content Management Systems such as WordPress, visual builders such as WIX, and e-commerce systems such as WooCommerce and Shopify. We can assure a simplistic approach to a sustainable website, giving you the tools needed to ensure long term growth and success through your website.
During the design of your site, we use UX and UI industry standards, branding principles and visual tools to build stunning sites. We design sites that customers love, and always keep your audience at the centre of the process to make sure that every design decision makes their journey through your website as simple and clear as possible.
We have a highly talented and creative design team who create engaging and visually stunning sites, as well as a highly versatile team of developers who are skilled across a variety of coding languages (CSS, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, Bootstrap). Our web teamwork alongside our team of content writers and digital marketers to build intuitive and captivating digital experiences for our clients and their customers.
This knowledge and experience allow us to produce stunning, intuitive websites for our clients that help them grow their digital presence and sales.
Web Design Bangor: How to Approach Web Design as an SME?
Web Design Bangor: Define Success
You can’t measure how your new website has performed without understanding how it needs to perform to produce results for your business. Need more sales leads? Need an increase in online orders? Set your target Return On Investment (ROI) to focus on the purpose of the new site. Designing a website based around great outcomes for your business starts with the very foundations. We’ll help keep your goals in view and make your site a true business asset.
Web Design Bangor: Ask Your Team
A website can help support the backbone of your business! Simply ask your colleagues which website features and content could help them and help your business. Great ideas from all quarters help create a team resource through team involvement. You’ll be amazed by the suggestions, insights and requests made by your own colleagues once they are involved in thinking about your digital presence.
Web Design Bangor: Know Your Customers
How do your customers prefer to make contact? What devices do they use? Is there a changing age demographic? Are there many early adopters? A good website design agency will help you understand how your customers want to interact with your site. We often find being locally based helps us to understand local customers. We can help you analyse and understand your segments if you need that.
Web Design Bangor: Keep Evolving
Your customers are changing and how they search for your company online, as well as what they expect to find on your site, will be changing too. Develop a partnership with your website design company to keep ahead of the competition. Without this forward-thinking, a website can date quickly and fall short of customer expectations. ProfileTree can help avoid this pitfall by working with the evolving nature of your digital world from the start.
Web Design Bangor: How Much Does a Website Cost
Working with so many different businesses over the years taught us to work with different budgets and requirements. We have created three different packages for our web design and development projects; through which we cater for different needs and requirements. In other words, you set the requirements, we tailor a package within the limits of your spending. The average cost of a full website project at ProfileTree is 7000£ covering research, UI/UX design, web development, SEO, and content migration. This price figure is subject to change according to the requirements of the website and future updates to our packages.
Web Design Bangor: Ready to Book a Free Website Audit?
A website audit is where one of our expert team members will get on a call with you to analyse the technical performance as well as the user experience and SEO performance of your website. We can discuss your goals and objectives for the business, your business process, and how you see your website fitting within the business narrative. Our specialist will go through that to recommend the right web design and development solutions.
Fill the form and send us your questions, we will be happy to answer all of them. Please do let us know if your business is registered in Bangor. Alternatively, you can book a chat with one of our team members to audit your website for free and find out how we can help you establish a strong website presence in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.
More services: SEO Bangor, Content Marketing Bangor, Social Media Marketing Bangor, Digital Marketing Bangor, Digital Training Bangor
