Web Design in Raleigh, NC

I’ve been developing websites for 10 years now and still haven’t figure it out what monthly SEO fee is for.

Most of Search Engine Optimization experts (SEOs) will try and convince you that SEO doesn’t have anything to do with Web Design, is a totally different issue and you need a monthly fee in order to rank high on Google. They abuse one of the Google ranking factors: as the site ages, it will be more trustful and will rank better. They will do nothing and you will pay them for that. They will even remind you each month that “your website is up on Google, we work so hard for you”. Is it really?

Let’s discuss our methodology. When someone designs a website with us, we take care of all the details like optimized CSS/XHTML code, website architecture, meta description tags, title pages, keywords targeted, etc. This means proper web design. META and TITLE tags, h1 and h2 tags, are HTML markup language not SEO tags. After going live, we place some links in our portfolio and maybe on some relative websites and web design/CSS galleries and that’s it.

In a couple of month the website will rank great, usually in the first page of Google search results. We do not charge anything for SEO. Ever. We just charge for web design services. We don’t even tell the client we have been taking care of SEO unless he asks.

Amazingly, a couple of weeks ago, someone contacted one of my clients and told him that he can rank much better for a couple of hundreds monthly fee. He is on the first position on Google Search Results. Here is the client: http://www.saberexterminating.com. Search on Google “Termite Inspection Raleigh”. Is he in front? So, what more would the SEO company do? Unless they where planning to develop same content for them, which I doubt, they where just trying to rip my client off.

Read and watch this recent interview with a well known Google engineer in USA Today. Try and find something that makes sense for a monthly fee. I couldn’t.

I would like to hear some comments about this issue. Maybe I don’t get it right, but then, how do my clients rank so high on Google without any monthly fee? Read more about Search Engine Optimization in Raleigh-Durham.

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Very often we get emails and phone calls from people asking for a web design quote. We have some of the best prices around for the quality we provide, and still, most of them say “your quote is over our budget”.

For people who really want a professional website and actually want visitors, here are some good tips and information about web design stages and the time involved.

Hourly Rate

Our hourly rate is $50. Does it seem to much? Not really. Almost 30% of it goes to taxes, 20% will be spend on running the business, vacation time, computers, software, etc. So how much the net pay for the designer will be? Usually $25 per hour.

Design Drafts in Photoshop

For a usual type of website, this design stage should take anywhere from 10 to 20 hours, depending on the client revisions. Slicing the photoshop file to create the actual, optimized for web images, should take 2 to 3 hours. This means anywhere form $600 to $1150.

Optimized, Valid CSS/XHTML Templates

This phase should take anywhere from 10 to 15 hours. What you’ll get is top of the line optimized code according with W3C Standards. This means between $500 and $750.

Integrating Templates with a CMS

This phase should take between 10 to 20 hours depending on the functionality desired. This means between $500 and $1000.

So, the total price for a website on a CMS should be between $1650 to $2900. What you’ll get is a great looking, professional website that will rank great on search engines, have visitors, and most important, easy to update in the future. There are no ongoing fees.

How Can Someone Quote a Smaller Price?

Web design is not magic. A logical explanation should exist. You will get what you pay for.

• They offer low quality web design
• They have a smaller hourly rate
• They will slightly modify a previous design
• They will copy someone else work
• They will use old web design technologies
• They will not optimize for Search Engines
• They will not use a modern CMS

How Can Someone Quote a Bigger Price?

Explanations are many but here are the usual ones:

• They have a big hourly rate
• They will offer what you don’t need
• They are a big company
• You will pay for extra staff
• You will pay for fancy corporate building
• You will pay for huge CEO salary

If you want results for your website you need a professional. After you get the quote, check company portfolio to know what you may expect.

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Before you decide on a web designer or web design company in Raleigh-Durham area, check and see if any of these mistakes are obvious on their website or portfolio:

Not Optimizing for Search Engines

Ask your web designer about search engine optimization. Ask him how he plans to optimize your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not rocket science, is better web design.

Search engine optimization will not bring you hundreds of visitors per day all of the sudden, but all the visitors will come to your site searching for a service you provide. If you do landscaping in Raleigh you should come up when people are searching “landscaping in Raleigh”. This is the kind of visitors your website needs.

Search “Web Design Raleigh” or “Web Design Durham, NC“. If the company or designer you are considering for a web design is not there, don’t bother. If they don’t know how to get their company website to the top, do you really think they’ll do a better job for you?

Using Tables Instead of CSS (Style Sheets)

HTML tables are a thing from the past. Since search engines evolved to be such an important part of the Internet, websites started to optimize their content for search engines and CSS web design offers just that: is optimized for search engines, is faster, more reliable, allows separation of design from content and much more.

Not Being Clear What the Website Is About

Attention spans are very short these days. Visitors shouldn’t have to figure it out what your website is about. It should be specified big and clear in every page. In their eyes.

Have Confusing Navigation

The best, proven way, to please everyone is to make the navigation clear and simple. Design should help enhance the most important sections of the website. People are browsing websites in different ways. Redundant navigation actually helps. For example, on our website only 5% of visitors click on portfolio but 70% of them click on Recent Projects thumbnails. This helps drive more people to our most important part of the website, our portfolio.

Using Small Text

What is the point in using small text? Everyone agrees that crowded design doesn’t help so thinking you show more information to the user is a mistake. You have all the space in the world. Use it wisely. Don’t be afraid of empty space. Give menu links breathing space. Text to close to the edge looks bad, not professional.

Using “Drop Down” Menus

Sometimes is hard for users to notice all your main menu items. Hiding important information from them and thinking they will go on top of your menu expecting a rollover is a big mistake. Identify the most important sections in your website content, and structure the information accordingly so you won’t need rollover. And you don’t have to agree with me, but the most visited sites on the Internet (Yahoo, Google, MSN, YouTube, Wikipedia, Myspace) are not using drop down menus on their homepage.

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When quality websites for low prices is your business model, it makes sense to use the best, most cost efficient developing and publishing tool available, Wordpress. Besides beeing easy to develop and, from the design point of view, extremely flexible, once you use it, you won’t even remember how you developed before Wordpress.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are thousands of developers all over the world working on it. It also means that is free to use for any website you want, without paying license fees. Hundreds of available plugins extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is almost limitless.

When it comes to CMS, the vast majority of small business owners do not need a full feature e-commerce website or a complex online community website like Facebook. The vast majority needs a simple CMS where they can:

• update the content as often as they want
• add how many pages they want
• insert photos
• add news
• write posts in a blog
• have a full feature photo gallery
• have members that can sign up
• have a simple online shop
• have a custom contact form that protects you from spam
• have search engine friendly optimized website
• have a feed aggregator like RSS or Atom
• create a custom real estate site

Wordpress handles all this and much more. Why would we need something else if Wordpress works perfect for almost all of our job requests? Why give someone who needs a Civic for his teenage daughter, a Cadillac?

Before you go to someone else for your next CMS project ask for a quote here. Chances are $1500 will get your website up and running on Wordpress. Well, we don’t talk so much as the other guys, yes, but we can save you $10,000. How about that?

Our experience with WordPress is recognized by the professionals. Our work was featured on many galleries showcasing Worpress Powered Sites.

We really like Wordpress.

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Small business owners from Raleigh-Durham and Triangle Area start moving their advertising budgets, from Yellow Pages and newspaper ads, online.

More than that, businesses that never had big budgets for advertising, start advertising online on Google and Yahoo for as low as $10 per day.

Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing can have a big impact on a small company online presence. But if you are looking for the best results, you need to know how to setup a PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign.

First, you need to consider the area you are targeting. If you are doing Air Conditioning and Heating in Raleigh area for example you want to show the ads only to people located in Raleigh area. You wouldn’t want to pay for online visitors from Charlotte, because you wouldn’t go there to fix their AC.

Then, you need to know how to select keywords properly so they will attract most of the potential buyers but in the same time exclude people who browse just for fun. For example if someone wants to advertise for Web Design in Durham you would want to exclude people who are looking for “free web design”, “free templates” or want to “learn about web design”.

One other thing is the quality of your content. You have to choose keywords that are significant for your content. This means that your website should be optimized for search engines. If you have an old website, that uses old technologies, it will be harder for search engines to properly categorize your website and your quality score will be lower. This means you will have to pay more for clicks.

Your ad content is very important also. You wouldn’t want to get lost, so using words that have a real impact is important. Your best price or a feature like “Free Inspection in Raleigh” would definitely attract visitors. Just be careful so the content of the ad is MATCHED by your website content.

Internet advertising and Pay Per Click is becoming a business by itself.

We only setup campaigns for clients that design or re-design their websites with us because it is a real hassle to do campaigns for websites not optimized for search engines. A small business needs potential clients and not Digg.com kind of traffic. The budgets can be as low as $10 per day and you will really attract clients.

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Templates are great tools when developing a website that is easy to update and maintain. The internet is full of great looking templates and themes, sometimes even developed by recognized, award winning designers. Building a website from a template, theoretically can save a great deal of time and money.

But what if your ideas and information do not fit with the template layout? Are you able to modify the coding behind the site, to make it work the way you want? As easy as it may seem, sometimes is complicated even to insert a meta tag, to modify the title tag, to enlarge a text block or to insert a menu bar. Customizing a template(or a Wordpress theme) requires knowledge and experience.

Many people are using free templates. Chances are that several websites are using the template you have chosen. Your site looks like a copy of several sites. To modify the color scheme, that works perfect for that particular template, you really need design skills. To insert great looking icons or images in your template, you need advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS and image editing. No mater how hard you try, the overall feel of the template will remain. Attention spans are very short and if you’re not grabbing your visitors attention in 2 to 3 seconds of getting onto your website they will move on. The last thing you need is that template feel.

When building a website you need advanced knowledge of SEO to create the proper website architecture in order to have the maximum exposure for search engines. If you don’t know how SEO works, your website will not have any visitors from search engines.

For some, a website template might be all that is required. For others, it is simply not worth it. If you want your website to have visitors, stand out in the increasingly competitive marketplace and have it’s own identity, you really need the help of a good web designer.

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Triangle Real Estate Websites Are Missing The Point.

• They are not user friendly
• They do not respect usability rules
• They do not respect the web standards (valid CSS/HTML)
• They are not optimized for search engines
• They do not have a good identity

Well-known Internet marketing companies advise real estate agents to offer value on their website like MLS Search, buyer and seller reports, info about a specific neighborhood and so on.

From experience I can tell that if a person wants to search for homes they will use established well known sites like realtor.com, fmrealty.com, remax.com, etc. They will not use small websites for searching. The same when they research, they will use zillow.com or the county tax bill records.

A small realtor website will never be able to compete against a big, established one that spends millions in web design, development and advertising.

All real estate agents want to present themselves as exquisite invaluable help in the process of buying a house. Excellence and experience are the words used most by realtors. How do realtors show this to their customers? An exquisite, top of the line website that uses the latest proven web design trends and technologies will definitely show their deserved online identity. They shouldn’t focus to much on virtual tours, search for homes, neighborhood reports and totally miss the point of excellence on the web. Real Estate agents should show their clients that are able to reflect their business philosophy in everything they are doing.

Being fresh by definition, a blog can be a great marketing tool today. Real estate agents can use it to build trust and offer the right amount of tips and information a home buyer expects to get when buying a house. It is easy to say “consider my website as your real estate information tool” but it is much better to actually offer this to your customers.

How real estate web design is going around Raleigh and Triangle Area? Are any of the real estate websites comming close to zillow.com the big web 2.0 hottie that is shaking the real estate business? Even if real estate agents do not agree, just remember that their clients, home buyers, made Zillow the success it is in just a couple of years. Is real estate business in Raleigh-Durham area prepared for the future?

The Internet is changing the real estate business fast. Neglecting their websites now can cost real estate agents a lot in the future.

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Before we get to it, first of all, we are not a SEO company. In fact we believe that SEO it’s totally misunderstood. SEO means better web design. It means to present your information properly for search engines and visitors at the same time.

The other day I ran across a local car dealer website. As a web designer I couldn’t help but notice their web page title(the heading Google displays for search results) : “Car Dealer Raleigh NC Car Raleigh Used Car Raleigh Truck Raleigh Car Repair Service Raleigh NC”.

Look at their description meta tag: “Car Raleigh NC Car Dealer of New Raleigh Cars and Used Car Raleigh, Commercial Trucks, Raleigh Trucks and SUVs. Raleigh Auto Dealer of Cars, Crossovers, SUV & More Cars. Raleigh Auto Repair Service to All Makes and Models. “ Is this how you present yourself to your customers? Do you really think that Google does not have algorithms to fight keyword stuffing? Repeating Raleigh so many times in the Title tag and Meta description tag seems to anyone as keyword stuffing. SEO is not just adding keywords to title tags and meta descriptions.

But being the most powerful and accessible HTML tags that a SEO has at hand, it is often the most abused. Google and Yahoo are fighting that. Here is what Google says: ““Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”

I searched Car Dealer Raleigh NC. The company website was nowhere in the first results. And all the other ranking factors are working for it: the domain is old, established, the website has tons of links even from established national car companies. It really should be in the first results and it is not.

What is the conclusion? Not all SEO companies will serve you a good product. Web Design is still in its infancy. It is not the same kind of business you are used to. Always compare your website with well known internet sites.

Read more about How Web Design achieves Great Search Engine Optimization.

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The most important thing when considering a web designer is the quality of his portfolio.

But the quality comes with a price. Sure, if we will charge $10,000 for a website, we are sure the website will get awarded and recognized by the professionals. But is this what the client really wants? He wants a website that works for a good price. You can compare it with buying a car. If you want a good reliable car to commute, you will buy a Honda Civic or a Ford Focus not a Ferrari. Of course everyone would like to drive a Ferrari, but how many are willing to pay for it? What’s interesting is that a lot of web design companies charge the price of a Ferrari for A Honda Civic… and most of the time for a five year old Honda Civic.

Now, another thing to consider is that everyone who knows a bit of HTML thinks he is a great web designer. Many times business owners do not understand why their website does not have any visitors and doesn’t have any results. Web design is all about experience. Design, Usability, Identity, HTML and CSS coding, SEO are all going hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other if you want a good website. Most web designers lack or don’t bother with at least three of these.

If you are not experienced with web design here is a good tip: compare your web designer work with successful websites on the internet like: facebook.com, linkedin.com, wordpress.com, blogger.com. Is their work coming close?

Now think how you met your web designer. Did your neighbor friend recommended him or did you really like his work, presented on his website? Is he really up to the task? If your website doesn’t have results, he probably is not.

Web design quality comes with a price - a good one at Betterimage.org. Try it.

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Although the old, award winning design, was not so bad, we concluded that a web design company should show its clients and potential customers that it can keep up the pace with the latest design trends and technologies. We decided to use Wordpress because it is the best publishing platform from the esthetics point of view.
The new design wants to be more usable, but also keep the exquisite look of a design company website. We hope that we succeded. The white background should help everything inside have more breathing space, the distinctive menu bar should make it easier to select the desired information, the specials ads should make people aware of our design services.
We would like your feedback. Thank you!

Our experience with WordPress is recognized by the professionals. Our new website design was featured on many galleries showcasing Worpress Powered Sites.

Here is our old design:

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