Ingredients for Success — What Makes a Great Website?

If you want your business to stand out from your competition, then your website had better be fantastic.  What makes a fantastic site you ask?   The answer is simple:  clarity, usability, purpose driven content, and dynamic, visually appealing graphic design — the four ingredients for a successful website.    

The average user spends just three seconds or less on a web page before moving on to the next site.  Essentially, you don’t have a lot of time to make a lasting impression. Your goal is to keep them on your site once they are there.  How do you do this?  You create a site that not just visually appealing, but one that is easy to navigate, clear, concise, and focused.  You need a dynamic site that encompasses a plethora of well constructed, professional characteristics that work together to create an overall look and feel of your business.  It needs to draw people in and create an environment that makes them want to stick around and see what your business is all about.

At Maryland Web Designers we have mastered the complexities of simplistic site architecture; we have carefully studied the best way to optimize websites based on their genre; we have devised a way to fulfill your website and business needs by working within your budget, and we have successfully perfected the art of relevant, visually appealing graphic design using all of the latest and greatest technology on the market.   We’re good at our job for one reason — experience.  Our client base is extremely diverse making us experts in variety and uniqueness. 

Below is an outline of import website components and how they can affect the success of your website.

Content is key on the internet.  It is the single most important component of the website process.  Content should be concise, easy to read, and purpose driven.  The average website consists of 10 pages and content should be updated as frequently as possible for optimization purposes. (see website optimization below)   Websites with the most relevant and current content rank higher in search engine placement — the higher you are on the list, the more people will be directed to your site.  In addition to our design services, Maryland Web Designers offers our clients access to experienced web content writers with over 10 years of corporate marketing experience — with experience writing  everything from brochure-based websites to dynamically driven content solutions.

It’s safe to say that the planning and design (website architecture) of a site is equally as important its content.  Organization and ease of navigation are key elements in website usability — a user can tell immediately if their experience on a site is going to be smooth or frustrating.  It is vital that the site is constructed in a way that flows with the content of the site.  If the site isn’t easy to navigate, the visitor, your potential customer, will become discouraged and go elsewhere.  Maryland Web Designers has designed and built hundreds of successful sites using carefully planned and executed site architecture solutions that enhance the overall effectiveness of our clients’ message and purpose. 

Once the site is built and the content is written, it’s important that it is optimized — the process of maximizing the performance of your site.  Specifically, website optimization means using particular keywords and phrases, text, and graphics within your site in order to increase your rank in search engine placement.  Maryland Web Designers knows how to successfully market your website. Our competitive and aggressive internet marketing strategy uses all of the popular online search engines including:  Google, Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista, Lycos Hotbot, Excite, Webcrawler, Northern Light, Inktomi, Direct Hit, AOL, as well as, many of the smaller search engines and local websites.  We are one of the only website design firms that have their own marketing engines and our own traffic, enabling us to supply local traffic to our client’s sites — bringing thousands of unique visitors to their websites each day.

A professional website takes a minimum of 40 hours to create.  We like to use the saying, “We can draw a stick figure in a few hours or a portrait in a few weeks.”  Simply put, whatever you want to put into it, you’ll get out of it.  We will work within your budget to give you a professional website that meets your business needs.  We write and design websites from $500 to $125,000 and with a diverse clientele, we have gained unparalleled knowledge of designing sites at every level that attract and retain visitors.

We use all of the latest and greatest technology and software: Dreamweaver – Studio 8;

Flash; Coldfusion MX; Data – Oracle – SQL Server.

We believe in building businesses artistically as well as technologically.  Five years ago we too were a start-up company.  Now, we use that start-up mentality and experience to help our clients achieve the level of success we found for ourselves.  We understand the ins and outs of starting and building a business, as well as growing and expanding existing ones.  With our diverse experience, as well as our carefully assembled resources, we have the ability to catapult your business to new heights of success.