The team at NSG/SEOA2 has been hosting, designing and programming websites since the mid 1990’s. Back then, it was new and innovative just to have a website.  Nowadays that’s a problem that has been solved - everyone can have a website for little or no cost.

The issue nowadays isn’t just having a website – it’s having a good website.  And by “good" website, we don't just mean looks.  We're talking about a website that's easy to use; one that contains useful and compelling information built using best practices; and one that works on mobile devices. We wrote this article to give you a snapshot of how that gets done, so when someone asks, "Where can I get effective website design in Ann Arbor?" you'll at least know where to send them to learn more.

Do You Just Want a Website, or a Website Design that Get Results?

Beyond all that, what everyone wants is a website that shows up well in Google. After all, what good is it to have a website if nobody can find it?  It’s one thing to show up when people search for the name of your company. It’s quite another to show up prominently when people search for the products and services you offer.  These are people who haven’t heard of you, but who are looking for what you offer. That's the promise of having a website – to attract new customers and more business!

Over the years, we’ve put a lot of time and energy into solving that last problem. We started SEO Ann Arbor to help people with just that – getting their websites to show up in Google. There’s a lot that goes into making that happen, but for now, let's focus on web hosting, programming, and design (if you want to know about the other stuff, please contact us).

There are those who believe that the behind the scenes programming and hosting for a site makes no difference – that you should just go with the cheapest or most common solution and you’ll be fine.  If we’ve learned anything over the past 20 years, it’s that those people are wrong!

Pre-Fab Website Builders - You get What You Pay For!

We’ve inherited many websites over the years from customers who already have one running, but they come to us because they're not showing up in Google.  A lot of these websites have been built using pre-fab website builders, or off the shelf content management systems such as Word Press, and we see the same problems over and over again:

·       They're not secure

·       They're slow to load

·       The source code is muddled and confusing

·       The site map / menu structure / URL’s are not optimized for SEO

·       The content isn’t optimized for SEO

·       The images are not resized or optimized

Most of these pre-fab website builders are cookie cutter solutions that try to be everything to everyone.  They aren’t customized and they certainly aren’t optimized.  They often include dozens of additional plugins that muddle up the source code and make the site extremely slow to load.  The images are stored at their original size, which is typically much bigger than it needs to be, leading to very slow load times, particularly on mobile devices.  Many haven’t been updated since they were designed, so they have security vulnerabilities that hackers will find and exploit. Not good!

Make it Easy for Google to Put You On Page One!

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned is that you want as few barriers between your site and Google as possible - slow loading, messy source code, oversized images that aren't optimized, insecurities and vulnerabilities that get your site blacklisted are all barriers that stand in your way. If you want results, make sure you do everything you can to avoid them. 

Many times we’ve taken existing sites that weren’t performing, reprogrammed and optimized them (keeping the same look and even most of the content) and generated significant improvement in the results. 

Remember, there are a lot of websites out there, but only 10 show up on the first page of Google for any given search. If you want to be just like everyone else, go with a cookie cutter solution and get lost in the shuffle. If you want a custom website that’s optimized to produce results, then we suggest a different path. Go with the experts at SEO Ann Arbor and NSG and get a website that’s built from the ground up to generate results for you.

Want to learn more about website design? Call 877-815-6974 - we'll be happy to take your call!