Being a business owner is hard with how much competition there is out there. You need a website that can attract customers to you and sell them, but where do you get started? How do you get noticed?

Eyetoeye Design specializes in effective Ajax web design solutions that work. At the core, we believe there are three fundamentals to having customers choose you. Effective SEO, professional content development and quality design. Here is our website design and building process.

INSPIRATION

Every website we build is completely custom, no templates. You are a unique business, and you deserve a unique website to match it. Since all our websites are custom, we want to find new ways to make your website stand out, we don’t have a cookie cutter formula that we use for all our customers. Far too many ‘design firms’ do this, and they rip off their clients by recycling their work. We always start with inspiration when designing any website. Without following the latest trends and pushing yourself, your design will get stale and boring. As designers we strive to stay relevant and up to date. We take the time to look for quality inspiration. Just because something is cool, or trendy does not mean that it is good design. This time is worth spending to make sure that we make your website has a creative look and stands out with unique and fresh design.

PLANNING

Having a plan for the website before getting started is key. With a plan, we can make sure that everything you want is incorporated properly and not forgotten. Before getting started on anything we need to organize all the content, pages, and other elements. We will sit down with you to plan out how many and what type of pages you need (Informational, blog, store, services, etc.). This gives us an idea of how large the website will be. Once we have all these questions answered we can start to piece it all together and layout each page with its according content and structure.

CONTENT

Often the most overlooked area of a website. Content is vital to sell yourself to potential customers. Having quality content that is structured correctly is vital to the success of your website. Most people don’t have the time to write out content that works great. It takes a long time, and many people struggle with writing. That’s why we offer professional content writing for all our websites. We have a proven formula for developing content for your business that is unique to you and directed perfectly to your business. All our content is built to flow well with your website and increase your SEO performance. The better the content is, the better we can target those keywords and answer people’s questions. Your content needs to be better than your competition’s. If you are just writing content to have content, there is no point.

IMAGES

Finding quality images related to your industry can be hard. We offer custom photography to compliment your website and other design materials. With custom photography you get images that show off your business, your employees and/or products and services. This is a great way to bring that personal touch to your website and make it look professional. If custom photography is not an option, we offer stock images to give you that professional look at a much cheaper price. We try to stay away from free stock banks as the images tend to be lower quality and because they are free, end up getting used a lot more by others so you may not have unique images. No matter what your budget is, we have an image option that will work for you.

STRUCTURE

Having proper page structure is not only important for visual appearances but also for readability and SEO. Your content should visually guide people through your website. If content is placed randomly, it can be hard to follow or know where to go next. Page structure is also huge for guiding people through your website. If it takes more than 3 clicks to find what you are looking for, page structure needs to be more optimized. Page structure should be like a family tree. Starting with the home page (grandparents) and then working its way systematically down to the other pages (parents, children, grandkids, etc.).

FONTS

Depending on your branding you might have fonts selected that you need to use. If not, we need to select fonts that suit your brand and style while remaining as readable as possible. There are many places to look for fonts. Google fonts has access too many fonts that are all free to use. This is a great place to get started. If you are looking for a more unique font, we have access to more exclusive fonts that are more creative and stylized. We will take the time to experiment with different fonts to find which ones we like and fit with your brand the best. Fonts can make or break the design of your website. If you go too crazy, they will look out of place or dated, but we also don’t like to play it too safe.

WHITE SPACE

White space does not necessarily mean the colour ‘white’ space. We like to think of it more as breathing room. Allow your design to breath. If all the information is jammed together, it can be very exhausting to read through it, but if everything is separated into their own sections with lots of breathing room around it, your website will be much more readable and allow for more creativity. 

SEO

SEO is what separates good website from great websites. SEO or search engine optimization is how you get noticed on the internet. Without SEO, no one will ever find your website because it won't be ranking in any areas so it won't pop up on Google. Google looks at every website and ranks them on how relevant they are and what they are talking about. The goal is to gain authority in your industry and increase your ranking to get noticed more. There are many different techniques to achieving this, some more effective than others. The number one way you will hear about when researching SEO is ‘backlinks’. Backlinks are the ultimate way to make your website rank better. Backlinks are basically an online reference system. If a website with a lot of authority has a link to your website, it shows that you are trustworthy, and Google sees this and will make you rank better. The issue with backlinks is getting them. Unless you have a way of getting backlinks on high level websites, you will end up wasting countless hours and getting no new backlinks. You also can’t pay for them, or you will be penalized. We stay away from them because they are time consuming and aren’t as effective at organically improving your website.

We focus more on the website side of SEO or ‘on page SEO’. We have developed a repeatable process to making a website effective for SEO that is very cost effective. We have tested this process on our own website, and it really works. If it didn’t work, how did you find us? Through all the steps above and some other ‘top secret’ website secrets we have turned our website from a poorly ranking website with very little traffic, into a big competitor for Ajax website design and SEO services. Without chasing any new backlinks, we have almost doubled how many we have in the past year, organically! The big trick with SEO is making your content better than your competitions. One thing to keep in mind with SEO is that it does not change overnight. It took close to a year for us to see the impact of our work. This is a really hard process because once you make an update to your website you want to make sure it works, but you have to wait 6 months to a year to see the full impact of what you did. A lot of SEO experts will charge you monthly fees and we believe this is just a scam, don’t fall for it. Once we are done building your website, we don’t charge any ‘maintenance fees’.

At Eyetoeye Design, we have years of experience creating content that not only communicates effectively with potential clients but is structured and focused for Google to index well and help you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Do you want a website that really rocks? Contact us today and let’s talk about making your Ajax web design something amazing.