Website Development

Web Development Bringing Life to your Website

Web development is the process of giving your well-designed website an awesome look and feel online.

It’s the job of web developers to bring life to a website’s design elements.

Think about the last time you were browsing around on a website, and even the simple act of clicking a button or changing pages was an entertaining experience.

Web developers have the ability to fully customize the functionality of your website.

The other option of course, is to choose a ready-made theme or template that fits your business needs, but this involves very little “development.”

Helping to bridge the gap between visual and interactive, our web development process begins by gaining a thorough understanding of your wants and needs.

This allows us to dream, design, then make it all come to life.

We don’t attempt to cram your business into a template – we legitimately start from scratch and design around you and your unique business.

Doing this allows us to develop features and functionality that aren’t contained in template-based sites like WIX, Squarespace or other platforms.

Perhaps these content management systems contain the functionality you want in one template, but are missing key elements that are available in another template.

Why not just build your own theme?

Take the Walla Walla Sweets website that we designed way back in 2017 for example; they’re a baseball team, so they needed things like rosters, schedules and news stories, among others.

Web Development and Website Speed

As one of the most often overlooked website elements, speed is an incredibly important factor to both search engines and users. When you click on a website and find yourself staring at the spinning loading wheel for what feels like an eternity, what happens next? You back out, never to return.

For consumers, nothing is a bigger turn off than a slow loading website, especially when they’re hungry for information or nearing the end of the buyer journey. In fact, Google published a white paper that revealed more than 50% of websites are abandoned if they take more than three seconds to load.

Having a web developer custom build your website allows you to bypass much of the bloatware and unnecessary features that come standard on popular website builder platforms. While it’s easy to fall for all of the flashy features that many templates try to push on users, web development is a classic case of “less is more”.

Not only does bloatware increase the complexity and learning curve for business owners, but it also affects the technical structure of the site, causing load times to increase across the board. User experience aside, website speed is also an important ranking factor for search engines.

Because search engines like Google are focused on creating the best user experience possible, slower websites are less likely to show up as top search results.

Security and Scalability

Even though there are countless benefits that digital marketing can bring to your business, below, we’ve covered some of the most important ones to help you see what you’ve been missing out on.

Web Development and Online Security

If you’ve spent any amount of time shopping online in recent years, it’s no secret that security is only becoming an increasingly important area for businesses to invest in. As we continue shifting to a more online-based world, keeping both you and your customers safe should be a top priority.

In fact, search engines are taking this so seriously, that Google Chrome has even implemented an automatic warning system that tells users when they land on a page that doesn’t have SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) installed.

To further support this, since 2014, Google has been slowly incorporating security as a ranking factor in their algorithm, with websites using an HTTPS format getting a slight preference over those that don’t. Does that sound crazy? As of 2017, Google also reported that more than 70% of all page loads through their Chrome browser are HTTPS.

Ultimately, all of this is designed to create a safer experience for consumers so they can feel more comfortable about making purchases with brands online. After all, the last thing you want to do is have a security breach that compromises consumer information, leading to a potential disaster for your business. To combat this threat, our web developers use proprietary source code and state-of-the-art security measures so that you can rest easy knowing your website is fully secure on both ends.

Unlike with popular website builders and open CMS platforms that often have numerous vulnerabilities, custom web development makes it incredibly difficult for hackers to get their hands on anything they’re not supposed to have.

Web Development and Your Ability to Scale

While business growth is always a good sign that you’re doing something right, it can also present its own unique set of challenges if you don’t have a solid foundation. Scaling your business online entails a number of technical factors that most business owners aren’t fully acquainted with, such as bandwidth.

For these reasons, having a custom built website gives you the freedom and flexibility to scale your business as it continues growing. Even though many popular website builders are a great option for small businesses when they start out, they can only go so far, eventually meaning you’ll need to migrate your entire website once that limit is reached.

However, it’s not just about growing your business as more and more customers come through the door, but also about adapting and making changes as your brand evolves. For instance, just because you rolled out a flashy, fresh new website doesn’t mean you’ll still be in love with it a year or even six months later.

The world of online business is fast-paced and ruthless, meaning it’s more important than ever that you stay ahead of the curve, particularly with your website. Even though we bad-mouthed all of the software features that popular website builders cram into their platform, the still remains that consumers are drawn to the latest and greatest.

Whether rolling out a new product or shifting your entire business focus, our team of professional web developers are capable of custom building website features that make your brand stand out above the rest.

Functionality & Optimization

Going hand in hand with what we were just discussing above, web development is all about creating a functional website that’s optimized around the customer journey. While there’s plenty of platforms and services out there specifically designed to help the online portion of your business run more smoothly, every brand operates differently.

What we mean by that is your business more than likely has a very different workflow and priority list than that of your competitors. Getting your website and business to run the way you want it to can be a costly and time-consuming process if you go the route of using website builders and open CMS platforms.

Rather than test driving thousands of templates, website features, and going through the painstaking process of figuring out why visitors are dropping like flies, having a web developer custom build a website specifically for you and your customers can ensure an optimized, high-conversion experience.

Because our web developers take the time to understand your customer journey, we can tailor a website that ensures your target audience get from point A (mild interest) to point B (wildly satisfied customer) in the most efficient way possible. From the business functionality side of things, our web developers are also able to make the lives of you and your employees much easier by implementing custom workflow systems.

With these, the everyday tasks that would otherwise monopolize your schedule and lead to an overall less efficient team can free up time for crucial business aspects. From lead nurturing to automation, our web developers can help your website run like clockwork, around the clock.