Small Business Web Design Services in New Jersey
While we have clients across the United States and Canada, we’ve never lost touch with our local roots here in New Jersey! Dr. David Wank started Short Hills Design when he lived in Short Hills, and although the company now operates out of Maplewood, we’ve kept our original Short Hills branding. We’ve built our 5-star reputation by taking the role of an advisor for our clients – as opposed to simply being another vendor with a service or product.
Why Your Website’s Design Is Key to Growing your Business
There are many ways to make your online presence more prominent including search engine optimizaiton, Google Business profile optimization, and citation building. However, the most important factor is the impact of your website’s design, and how this design resonates with your vistiors. As one of the top web design companies in NJ, and with over 15 years of experience, we are able to help build you a custom website that drives new business.
No Long-Term Contracts and You Own Everything!
We are so confident in our ability to exceed our customer’s expectations, that we are one of the very few website companies that work actively to make sure that our clients own their own every aspect of their websites (and not us). Many companies will try to lock their clients to their ecosystem with long-term contracts or proprietary systems that require the client to make a herculean effort to switch vendors. At Short Hills Design, we want to earn your business every single day, and our clients remain our clients because they want to — not because they have to!
Custom Web Design – for Your Business and Your Customers
At the end of the day, every website on the Internet is exactly the same — a collection of text and images that relay a message to your visitors. However, what makes our approach to web development uniquie is that we build not only for you, but for your customers. If your website caters to an older population, we’ll design the site with larger fonts, larger buttons and improved color contrast so it’s easier for these users to navigate. Some development companies will use the same template for every website, regardless of the type of business — and at Short Hills Design, we know there is no “one site fits all” website design.
Unlock the Power of High-Converting Web Design
Websites need to be built in a particular manner wtih specific features in expected places. For example, your logo should always be on the top left of your website, and clicking the logo shoudl bring your visitor back to the home page. Remember, it’s not always your logo design or your graphic design that makes the difference in whether or not you acquire new clients online — it’s your messaging that matters the most. There’s no point spending money on SEO or other forms of digital marketing unless your website is ready to receive the traffic. Think about it — if you owned a restaurant would you let people make dinner reservations if you didn’t hire a chef yet?
We are a Local NJ Website Design Company
Short Hills Design was founded by Dr. David Wank when he lived in Short Hills, NJ. And while we are now based out of Scotch Plains, we retained the name as that’s how our customers have grown to know us as a leading web design agency.
Your First Website Design?
If you are building your company’s first website, then congratulations! It’s an exciting (and sometimes stressful) time and you need to work with a company that has patience and experience. At Short Hills Design we’ve worked with dozens and dozens of small business over the years and have experience with websites that are as small as 5 pages! Don’t let someone convince you that your first website needs to be 25 pages with loads of blog posts — the single most important thing you need for your first site is to make sure your contact information (phone number, email, chat, etc.) is prominent and that your visitors can easily get in touch with you. Once you have this information in place, you can start to focus on your CTAs (calls to action) and your service or product pages. With this foundation in place, you can steadily build your site and grow your content. And once you have your website launched, then you can start to think about future content management and marketing — but you need to get the design basics down first.
What is the website development process?
At Short Hills Design we have the web design and development process down to a science. Here are the steps in our web design workflow:
- Discovery. Once we agree that we are a good fit for you or your company, and that you are a good fit for us, we proceed with the discovery phase. In this critical step we try to learn about you and your business. We explore key details including your goals for the website (new clients? new patients?), the demographic (what type of people are you looking to attract), your services (what are your services and why should people come to you?). In addition, we’ll review a few websites that you like (and why) as well as a few website you don’t like (any why).
- Design. We now take the information we gathered above along with what we learned about you, your style, and your potential customers, and start the design process. We produce mockups (design ideas) for you to review so we can ensure that we are always on the same page (no pun intended). While all professional and service websites need to have the same general structure in order to improve usability and meet user expectations, it’s also critical to design your site in a manner that reflects your business. For example, use of colors such as gold and black with a script front may reflect a more expensive or refined product, whereas use of pastels and sans-serif fonts bring a more relaxed and modern look and feel. Take a look at our portfolio to see the wide range of designs we’ve created for different business styles.
- Development. Once we’ve agreed upon the design of the site, we code the site and build it out in WordPress on a development server. In this manner we can build the site privately online and you can watch and give feedback. And don’t worry — the development site is completely hidden from the Internet, and only people with the link will be able to view it. This step usually takes 2-3 weeks depending upon the size of the site and the volume of content we need to add.
- Launch. When we’ve completed the site build and done a quality assurance check, we will ask you to review it to make sure it’s as you’d expect, and we then launch the site live on the Internet. Although launch problems are rare these days, we like to launch on a weekend just in case there’s an issue so we can minimize any downtime.
- Post-Launch. Once the site is live on the Internet, we do a second quality assurance check you, and your complimentary update period of 14 or 30 days starts. (depending upon your package). It is during this period that we like to schedule your WordPress training (depending upon your package) so we can teach you how to edit and update your new site, and to be as independent managing your website as you’d like to be.
Rebuilding your Website?
When clients come to us and tell us that they “need a new website” our first questions is, “why?” The reason we ask this is because building a new website isn’t the solution to every website-related problem. What we don’t want to do is to have you in a position where your current site generates 10 new clients per month for your business, and the new sites only generates 5! Thus, it’s important to understand the specific factors that make you question your website’s performance.
Consider the following common situation where we are asked to consult for a small business owner who comes to us and says something along the lines of, “I need a new website because we are only generating 10 phone calls per month from the existing site.” At first glance this request sounds like a no-brainer — if the site is only generating 10 calls per month, then there must be something wrong with the site and they must need a redesign? Correct?
Incorrect! Let’s look at two examples with data – in one instance the client does need a new site, but in the other instance, the client’s site is just fine, and redoing the site would be a mistake!
Example 1: if your website receives 200 visitors per month and only 10 people contact you, then you probably have a problem with your website or your website’s messaging.
Example 2: if your website receives 10 visitors per month and 10 people contact you, then you probably have a fantastic website and you need more traffic — not a new site!
Of course if your website was built in 1995 (or looks like is was built in 1995) then a redesign is probably in order. But before you spend time and money rebuilding something that might be working well, make sure you work with a company such as Short Hills Design that focuses on diagnosing your website/marketing problems before offering a solution.
Marketing your Website
Not every business needs to spend money on website marketing. And while you can review some of the marketing options below to see which if any apply to your business, every website MUST have Google Analytics 4 installed. Google Analytics is Google’s free website traffic software that is essential to have in order to learn about how the number of visitors that come to your website, where they come from, and how they interact with your business.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimizaiton (SEO) is the process by which we optimize your web pages to align with the topics that visitors are searching for, and we offer SEO as a service for new and existing sites. However, before you engage an agency to implement a SEO campaign, you must make sure that your web design is structurally sound and build to Google’s webmaster standards. All of the website that we build are SEO-ready and designed with Google’s web design guidelines in mind.
Short Hills Design and our History with WordPress
We’d been building websites for our clients in New Jersey and across the US and Canada for more than 15 years. In fact, we’re so well versed in WordPress web design that our founder, Dr. David Wank, lectures at WordCamp meetings about the development process. Below is a video of Dr. Wank’s lecture from the 2019 WordCamp meeting in Montclair, NJ.
Contact Us
We love to hear from local businesses in New Jersey, and we encourage you to get in touch with us to setup a complimentary consultation. You can give us a call (973)-506-2345, use our messenger at the bottom right, or use our contact form.