Web Design in Kansas City.

The primary reason for a local agency is that you need tailored Kansas City SEO, which differs from the general variety in that it provides much more accurate results, helping you get to the audience most likely to do business with you. Local businesses find most of their customers through this type of search engine optimization. How many customers? Check out this simple stat:

Finances Online has gathered this statistic (originally measured by Blue Square Management) along with several others that are equally as impressive. For instance, the same source reports that more than half of online searches result in a store visit if the search contains the term “near me.” To boil it down to a simple fact, local search engine optimization matters, and a lot.

So you need localized Kansas City SEO. But you’re wondering what that has to do with web design and how NEWMEDIA can help. The answer is straightforward: NEWMEDIA has the experience and expertise in the field, as well as the reputation to back it up. We specialize in all aspects of digital marketing and know how to create SEO-friendly websites to match your exact business goals.

If you’re curious to understand precisely how a Kansas City web design agency can boost your search engine optimization and other digital marketing efforts, keep reading as we break down the subject, starting with a brief history of web design.

The beginnings of the internet in the late 80s didn’t have much to offer regarding graphic design. In fact, the way early web pages looked was more a matter of necessity than intentional application of a particular aesthetic. Yet, this doesn’t mean the forerunners of modern web designers weren’t already active back then.

Still, the means of early web design were quite limited. The most that a web designer could work with was a black background, differently colored pixels, and blocky symbols. Interestingly enough, many graphic designers today look back to this aesthetic with nostalgia, often paying it homage in their works.

The early to mid-nineties were the time of numerous firsts, both in terms of the internet and website design. In 1991, the first HTML web page went online, courtesy of the team at CERN. While the page was nothing more than organized text, this represented the starting point for website development and design.

The following year, the internet saw its first photo. Funnily enough, the image was most akin to an early meme: a fake promotional photo for the parody band Les Horribles Cernettes. While it’s difficult to imagine today’s web design without images, this 1992 example was what started the wave of browser optimization for content that went beyond mere text.

It didn’t take long for the world to realize the internet’s marketing potential. In 1994, web development entered a new era of pages with clickable banners, and this type of website design turned out to be an instant hit. The very first banner ad, courtesy of AT&T, had an impressive 44% clickthrough rate – something that most modern banners couldn’t hope to achieve. Another milestone event took place the same year: the formation of Geocities. This web hosting platform allowed users to design their home pages without extensive coding knowledge. While early adopters had little more to work with than some creative backgrounds, text formatting, and pixel art, it’s clear how this platform was a forerunner to modern DIY variants like WordPress websites.

Once websites with images, banners, text, and other rudimentary elements became prevalent, the initial groundbreaking steps were taken. The time came for new tools to be developed to drive web design further.

The latter half of the ’90s saw a revolution in ways to build websites and structure website content. Ramping up web development and design, these novel tools also drove the popularity of the internet to an unprecedented scale. The following chart from Our World in Data shows this impact the best:

From 1994 to the end of the century, the number of internet users grew nearly 10 times. The late ’90s saw the rise of many modern giants, including Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Google, and Alibaba, and this impressive growth started with one of the crucial programming languages: Javascript.

Javascript changed the face of the internet forever. The language made interactive web design possible, giving the world of web development a whole new arsenal of tools. With Javascript, websites could feature interactivity on a yet-unseen level, like embedded forms and drop-down menus. In other words, accessing certain functionality no longer required a visit to a different page.

The web design revolution continued in 1996 with the introduction of FutureSplash – you likely know it under its more popular name Adobe Flash. This tech opened up website structure to multimedia, giving every web designer the opportunity to utilize video, audio, and animated GIFs. While this sounds downright futuristic for the era, Flash came with a significant downside: Every user needed to have it installed to view the content as intended.

This era of web development and design culminated in software that (finally) separated the HTML content from the visuals. The software in question was CSS, and it made web design more flexible than ever. As a result, web development was ready to start moving forward in massive leaps.

If you’d say that speed is everything when it comes to website performance, you wouldn’t be far from the truth. Just check out this graph from Pingdom:

The graph tells a simple tale: Build a website that takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, and your bounce rates will skyrocket. Naturally, nobody wants that simply due to wasted conversion opportunities. However, the problems caused by slow site loading go beyond that.

How fast your site loads has a direct impact on ratings. This impact is further increased when you account for the increasing number of visitors leaving your website within the first five seconds. The ultimate result: almost non-existent conversions and an abysmal ranking. That’s more than enough to show how much design can impact search engine optimization.