Surveying the landscape before drafting the blueprints

You'll find the following text on our About page:

"We don't force you to use technology that maximizes our profit. We discuss your needs, then build a website that maximizes your investment."

These aren't empty words, and the website projects below are perfect examples of how we can "maximize your investment." 

Websites can be more than marketing tools

Stafford Tile & Stone has been a great client of ours since 2008, and we built a new website for them in 2012. It's gone through a series of facelifts and upgrades over the years, but it was still mostly a marketing tool. That has changed now since Peggy Stafford contacted us a few months ago with some great new directives. "We need more out of our website. We need for it to be the Stafford Tile location that is always open and always available for our customers."

I've been in many situations where a developer purchases a domain name for a client, and shortly thereafter the parties split ways. The client then hires me, and now we have to go through the domain transfer process. Many times there's no friction from the jilted party, but sometimes it can be a mess.

As a website developer who primarily builds content management system websites on established CMS platforms, I always had a bad feeling about Squarespace, Wix, Weebly and other "do it yourself" website tools. I'd wonder, "Will these services eventually take over the small business market? Will I lose business to these guys?"

Lately I've been contacting the clients that host websites at I Design about the importance of adding Transport Layer Security or a Secure Sockets Layer certificate (SSL) to their website hosting package. In the past, SSL was reserved for websites that shared sensitive data with users or sold products. But that has changed and in today's world, secure websites are a must. 

Leger & Shaw is a full service law firm concentrating in maritime law and class actions & complex litigation. They hired a national company to build their original website, but they became frustrated with the poor design and lack of service and learned that bigger is not always better.

In my last news article, Does your website need a hero image?, I questioned whether following this layout trend was absolutely necessary. But I also mentioned that most of my new sites utilize photo sliders on the home page. So, if you're going to use a hero image or a big image slider on your home page, think about how it should look and work. Here are some basic rules to consider.

Take a look at almost any newer website design on the Internet today and there's a great chance you'll see a giant photo or a huge photo slider on the home page. Just like fashion, architecture, and other industries, web design follows trends. People see other sites and they want their site to look the same. They go to seminars where "professionals" tell them "your site must have an enormous photo on the home page." 

I've just published a new website for the Crescent Palms Motel located off Broad Street on Martin Luther King Boulevard. The property has a ton of rich history which you can read about on the site, so if you're ever in the neighborhood, drive by and check it out. You can also view photo galleries of the newly renovated property and the original Mason's Motel.