Web Design, Development, and Strategic Services

There are many factors to consider when deciding between hiring an agency or a freelancer. We’ve detailed them all in this article, but here’s the TL;DR version.

Hiring an agency, especially one with relevant services besides just design and development, can save you time and energy. An agency will take care of project management, whereas to redesign and launch a new website you’ll likely need to hire and manage a designer (not all designers are experts at both UX and UI design), a developer, and ideally an SEO who can ensure a seamless migration that doesn’t tank your traffic and rankings. 

Budget, timelines, locations, and workload are all considerations. Agencies also have different approaches that can impact how easy—or stressful—the work is. We pride ourselves on our carefully honed processes. We’re also around for the lifetime of your website to answer questions and provide support!

Every organization is unique, how often you need your site redesigned depends on your needs. But a low-code website with a visual editor (like the ones we build) gives your team significantly more flexibility and control over layouts, settings, and styles. That means you can go a lot longer before you need a full redesign. 

Common reasons to need a redesign are: 

• Unable to manage content or make changes without a developer, needing to move to a more flexible platform
• Undergoing a rebrand
• Too much heavily outdated content 
• Site architecture/navigation needs a major restructure
• Expanding or going in a new direction

We’re not just biased when we say yes—for the best possible outcome, you need to give equal attention to both UX and UI, because they work together! 

User experience (UX) design focuses on usability. It ensures that your site and your page layouts have an intuitive flow, that key content is easily discoverable, and that users are guided towards conversion. 

User interface (UI) or visual web design is about the look and feel of your site, and how users engage with it. UI design considers branding, responsiveness, accessibility, and interactions.

A redesigned site can absolutely result in increased impressions, increased organic search traffic, new keyword rankings, and improved rankings. Its success depends on a few factors. 

It seems obvious, but the quality of your content can make or break your performance. If your redesign includes revised content, make sure that it’s at least as good as, or ideally better than, what you had before. Be careful when heavily rewriting or deleting high-ranking pages. 

You need to be extremely detail-focused with technical SEO at launch time. This could include 301 redirects, DNS swaps, domain forwarding, 404 crawls, structured data configuration, resubmitting your XML sitemap to search engines, and more. The site needs to be monitored closely during the week after relaunch, and any abnormalities addressed immediately. 

And then you need to capitalize on the attention that search engine crawlers are paying to your updated site. This means consistently publishing high-quality, optimized content, while staying on top of new optimizations that support SEO and AI citations. 

The good news is that we can do all of that (and more) for you.

Mobile-friendly web design is no longer a consideration—it’s mandatory for your website to succeed. Search engines don’t like websites with issues on mobile devices, and neither do the humans visiting those sites. 

Responsive web design, which is what we do, means that your site is designed and built to adapt to the vast range of screen sizes your users might have.

One of the key focuses of UX design is creating a flow that’s always guiding users towards conversion. A strong UX design will drive a higher conversion rate, while poor conversion rates can often be traced to a weak UX design. 

Sometimes conversion rate optimization (CRO) is subtle, such as placing social proof right above a callout to your Get a Quote page. Other times it’s meant to feel urgent, such as placing a donation CTA in the same section as an emotional story about who the money helps. 

An experienced UX designer is thinking about CRO while making navigation and layout decisions.

SEO is not dead! AI tools take their information from websites that they can find in the search results. They are more likely to use high-ranking ones, because those sites are more likely to contain current, accurate, quality information. We have a lot to say on this subject—you can read about it in our founder’s monthly newsletter.