Web design in Vancouver.

Let’s start with the big “why” question – why should you focus on both web design and development? It’s a big question, especially when so many small businesses can come up with oodles of reasons why they don’t need a web design company:

We saw a rather distressing stat recently: Only 19% of business owners who don’t currently have websites (or any form of web solutions) believe that building a website will help them grow their business by 25% over three years. Less than a fifth of business owners. That means that 81% of them don’t see what a website does for their business, creating a disconnect that is one of the big reasons why they don’t have them – why invest the money when you’re not confident about getting the growth? We understand that. It may be an opinion that you share. But our experience shows that 25% growth in three years is actually an understatement. Try 10,000% growth in five years! If that seems unrealistic, it isn’t. NEWMEDIA has helped several small and medium-sized businesses achieve this explosive growth with our web design and digital marketing strategies. And the reason is simple – your customers expect you to be online:

No matter where you look, all industries have a majority of people who’ll jump to search engines to find sites (and research companies) before they buy. In some cases, such as the water heater industry, over 90% of people do online research first.

The message is simple – the majority of your customers want to check you out online before they check you out in person. If you don’t have a website to show them, they’re going to be gone before you ever get them through the door. As for business growth, you can wave bye-bye to that because you won’t grow anywhere near as fast as you could if you had a website.

We’ve established that a lot of small and local businesses don’t have websites and that they’re missing out on a lot of potential customers through their lack of online presence. But you may not know how many small businesses don’t have sites:

Over a quarter (27%) as of 2022.

For context, that means of the 79,989 companies that call Vancouver home, 21,597 haven’t engaged in any form of web design.

That’s a problem for those businesses.

But it’s an opportunity for you because of a simple reason – getting online instantly puts you ahead of over 21,000 other companies. Even the most basic of functional websites is at least an online presence that people can find. And as we’ve already established, most of your customers are going to look for you on the web before they buy from you.

Of course, “basic functionality” just gets you ahead of the companies that don’t have sites. As for the local businesses that are online – you need a site that demonstrates your credibility through its design:

Three-quarters of people are sending you a message – professional companies have professional websites. “Basic” won’t cut it, even at the local level, so you need quality web design to establish your credibility long before you ever see your potential customer.

Credibility is the breeding ground for trust.

And through that trust, you get more customers while propelling your business past the hundreds of other local enterprises that aren’t even online.

Let’s switch the conversation to branding. It’s something that every company needs to do – brand themselves so that their customers recognize who they are and connect with them on an emotional level. And yet, so many businesses do a terrible job of creating a consistent brand:

First, the good news – 95% of companies have formal brand guidelines in place. Good for them! Having those guidelines is a tacit recognition of the fact that you need to keep your brand consistent to get people to connect to it. So, why is it that only a quarter of companies actually follow the guidelines they themselves put in place?

We don’t have the answers.

But what we do know is that failure to create consistent branding is a problem that leads to declines in revenue, whereas following your branding guidelines means more money in your company’s collective pocket:

Consistency creates cash – 23% more of it for brands that manage to keep their look and feel the same across all of their marketing channels. How does web design fit into this conversation? In one of two ways – either your designer needs to make sure your website follows your existing guidelines or, more excitingly, your new website can become ground zero for your entire brand positioning. You can use your site to establish your color schemes, type fonts, logo, and design ethos, all of which spread into your other marketing. Print. Social media. Even internal company communications. They can all be influenced by your website’s design, creating the consistency that leads to more revenue for your Vancouver business.

Anybody can make a website using a template.

It’s easy – find the right platform, pick a template, and pop your brand’s colors and content onto it. Simple. In less than a day, you can have a website up and running.

But it won’t be a professional website.

It’ll just be a site that looks the same as every other site that uses the same template, with nothing that makes it unique to your brand apart from your logo and color scheme.

That’s a problem because of something we pointed out earlier – the first impression factor. Remember that 94% of a visitor’s first impression forms around your site’s design. If you present them with a template (especially one they’ve seen before), you’re not going to wow them. They’re just going to say “meh” because the design does nothing for them.

NEWMEDIA’s professional website design is the furthest thing from templating that you can get.

Every design we create is unique.

Unique to your business.

Unique to your needs.

And unique to the customers who have been there and seen it all before and are now looking for websites to wow them.

Let’s say that you already have a website.

First off – congratulations! You’re already ahead of the 27% of companies that don’t have their own websites, so you’ve made a good start in the digital race. But remember – 73% of your competitors have websites, too, so simply being online isn’t enough to win that race. If this were sprinting in the Olympics, you’d have one or two runners who fell at the starting blocks, leaving you running against five or six others with whom you’re neck-and-neck.

How do you pull ahead?

We can tell you how you don’t win that race – by having an outdated website:

There are a few interesting stats there (and we’ll get to the slow loading issue in a moment), but the stat that needs your attention covers outdated design – 38.5% of people wave bye-bye if your website is out of date.

Knowing that, ask yourself a question:

When did you get your current website designed?

If your answer is “a few years ago,” then you’re already running the risk of losing over a third of your visitors before they look beyond your home page. And that makes you a candidate for NEWMEDIA’s website redesign service.

Think of redesigning as a blend of the old and new.

We take what works from your website right now (you may have amazing content, for instance) and meld it with an updated design that brings you bang up-to-date with what visitors expect. So, that 38.5% of visitors you used to lose? They’re going to stick around because they’re seeing what they need to see.

Visitors who stick around are visitors that you have a higher chance of converting into customers.

Let’s say you have a website designed.

You’re happy with the wireframes, and the digital designs look amazing. But when you click on a link, nothing happens. Why? There’s no coding underpinning the design, leaving you with something that looks pretty but doesn’t do anything.

To make that design interactive, you need web development.

Think of web development as the other side of the website creation coin. Where design is all about the look and feel of your site (remember – first impressions and navigation matter), development is about making it work. It covers all of the basics of functionality:

• The coding (PHP, HTML, etc.) that makes the site functional
• Working links, both internally and externally
• The databases needed to accept customer and payment details
• Forms that send messages to your inbox

Simply put, if it’s something with which a visitor must interact, it needs a web development team to make it work.

At NEWMEDIA, we treat web design and development as what they are – two sides of the same coin. For new websites, that means we handle all of the coding and complicated techy stuff to get your site up and running. But we can also help with existing sites. Our web developers can add features to sites that are already good, helping you to make your site great.

We can’t overstate just how popular WordPress is – it’s the biggest content management system (CMS) in the world.

How big?

Over 800 million websites use WordPress, and when it comes to CMS providers, WordPress is the clear number one:

A staggering 58.7% market share. The next-best “off-the-shelf” CMS (Joomla) only manages 6.6%. So, WordPress is massive. But it’s also often something that we told you earlier to avoid:

Templated.

Most agencies that offer WordPress design do it the easy way. They look for a template, slap your branding on it, add some content, and call it a day. That’ll be a few thousand dollars, please!

NEWMEDIA doesn’t do that.

We build unique web designs from scratch and port them onto the WordPress CMS so you get the best of both worlds – a wow-worthy design and a CMS that’s simple to use and loaded with features. Better yet, we can make those features better. Our web developers can implement the plug-ins you need from the WordPress community to customize your CMS so it does precisely what you need it to do.

So, you don’t need to abandon WordPress to have a great website.

You just need web designers (hint – NEWMEDIA) who know how to help you get the most out of a CMS that over 880 million websites use.

Browsing websites using mobile devices is massive. And why wouldn’t it be? Name one person you know who doesn’t have a smartphone in their pocket, and you’re naming somebody who has fallen well behind the times.

The vast majority of us have smartphones (and other mobile devices, like tablets) that connect to the internet. So, it stands to reason that we’re all (including your customers) getting mobile to check out businesses.

And we are:

Oberlo predicts that 56.86% of all web traffic will come from mobile devices in 2023. And though this is slightly down on the 59.66% of traffic in 2022, the above chart shows a clear trend – most people have used mobiles to browse the web since 2017.

That’s a trend that won’t go away.

And the people who use mobile devices to browse the web expect the same thing from your website as the people who use desktops – high-quality design:

Almost three-quarters of people (74%) say they’re more likely to return to your website in the future if it works well on mobile devices. You can draw your own conclusions about what they’re going to do if your site looks terrible on mobile.

“Hold on,” you say. “Does that mean I need to get two websites developed – one for desktop and one for mobile?”

A few years ago, the answer would be yes. But more recent web design technology allows you to create responsive websites.

What are they?

Exactly what they say they are – websites that are designed to respond to whatever device a visitor’s using so it displays the best version of the site for that device. For mobile users, that means no more pinching and zooming around sites that are clearly made for desktops. They get a mobile experience that’ll keep them coming back, and you don’t have to sacrifice the desktop experience that you traditionally deliver.

NEWMEDIA builds responsive websites.