Commercial Website Development
What we mean by "commercial website development:"
For the past 25 years we have built (and optimized) complex business websites that display products, services and offerings such as real estate listings, tickets available for events, catalogs of artwork for sale, and professional photographers displaying their wares online. We routinely get great placement for our clients in Google's search results.
We help our clients to create databases of their offerings, then pull information back out of those databases to make web pages that rank well at Google for whatever the product or service is. We help our clients by creating unique shopping carts and online systems to sell and keep track of their inventory and update the info displayed in their website automatically. As their businesses have grown, we've helped our clients expand their websites to keep up with their growth in services and the expansion of their product lines and service areas.
Technically, we are "full stack" LAMP website developers: we create websites using JavaScript, Linux, Apache, MySQLi, and the php programming language. Typically we use the Bootstrap platform, Ajax and JavaScript and a lot of plain old HTML to make business websites. We have the expertise to make websites that can keep track of thousands of products while selling them through a custom shopping cart. We are an especially good fit for realtors looking to compete against Zillow and Redfin. To see some of our work, go to our references page
What Should Your Website Do For You?
First ask, "What should your website do for your visitors?" How does it help them? In 2022 Google announced a "helpful content" update. If your website doesn't help people, it will not rank as well at Google.
Only then, ask what you are trying to accomplish through your website? While a commercial website always has several purposes, the main thrust must be to sell your product or service. To put it bluntly, "To make you money." You do this by helping people, either with products that actually help them, or services that truly help. So:
- First, your website must be an effective advertisement
for your products or services. We can help you make your website into an effective advertisement.
What Makes an Effective Advertisement? - Second, your website should give your visitors enough information about your company so they feel confident about buying from you. You should provide the kind of info that used to be found in corporate brochures, fact sheets, testimonials and so on. Decades ago, we called such things "sales aids"—now those simply need to be part of your website. We can help you better inform your customers about who you are and what you're selling, without all the corporate double-speak and marketing buzzwords.
- Third, your website ought to further your Public Relations message to the general public about the kind of company you are and the good things you are accomplishing. We can help you build the right PR messages into your site.
Your website probably doesn't need re-branding, a new logo, or the latest sliding image animations to accomplish those goals. What can seem like a great idea to a website designer is not always best for the company the website represents!
For tons of practical advice on how you can accomplish your goal of making more money from your website (and how we might help you) see our How to Design a Commercial Website page. Or contact us to develop your business website from scratch or to make your existing site actually achieve the results it should get by doing what it should have been doing all along.
Search Engine Optimization
We started "optimizing" websites so they'd rank well in the search engines back in 1998, several years before that process acquired the name "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO". We ensured there was sufficient relevant content, that the behind-the-scenes technical points were in place to allow the site to be indexed, and that the pages had "on-page" factors in place.
This was well before the rise of Google, if you can remember such a world. There were nearly a hundred different search engines back then.
The reason we learned to write HTML code, JavaScript, and how to program web pages in PHP was that we needed to bypass various webmasters who were not technically skilled enough to implement the SEO techniques we had learned and which we knew worked. In other words, we were forced to learn to write code in order to change our clients' websites so they would rank well. Now, when we build large, data-driven websites from scratch, we build the technical SEO into the bones of the site, and create the needed on-page SEO within every page.
Consulting
Need an analysis of why your website isn't selling?
