There are several aspects web design that you may not have considered... especially if you already have a website and are looking to get it redone. Unless you're a new business or upstart, you can't just abandon your old site. So let's start there. 

MAINTAIN YOUR GOOGLE LIST OF INDEXED PAGES:

Let me ask a simple question first. If you upgrade your cell phone from your existing one to the newest one, do you change your phone number? Of course not. Remember this when you upgrade your website. You need to remember all of the pages in your current site. Otherwise, it's like getting a new phone number. Google and other search engines will not know how to find you. In fact do this so you'll have the information:

Go to Google and search site:yourdomain.com (no spaces). So for me, that would look like this:

Your new web design does not have to have the exact same set of URLs as the old site BUT there should be a provision in the code to redirect all of the old pages to new pages. If this were your cell phone and you did change phone numbers, this would be like forwarding your cell phone number so your peeps could still find you... same deal here with the search engines.

BRANDING NEW WEB DESIGN

You want to be new and fresh but you also need to maintain a degree of familiarity. When your existing clients land on your new site, you want them to recognize you in your Sunday best... not your Halloween costume! They need to still know it's you. This is a Graphic Design challenge. If you have an established logo, that helps. You can re-use it and work around it for website design colors and tone. 

COMPETITION and CONVENTION

Web designs will often have more similarities than differences when compared to competitive sites. People expect certain conventions, especially when dealing with business websites. There's nothing wrong with someone going to your site and having a "wow! this is a really cool site" moment. There is a problem if that same person can't easily find the information he or she is looking for. If you want to be edgy and cutting edge, do it with things that make your site easier, not more difficult for your customers to find information. 

LOW COST WEB DESIGN

Branding, graphic design and programming are the most expensive aspects of a new website. Most new clients I get come with high-end expectations and a low-end budget. After all - can't I get a free website somewhere else? Yup you can. I'll even help. But it will look like a box; it will be unimpressive; and I rarely see sites from Wix or Godaddy rank well. Not that they can't. FREE HAS A PRICE!

But you can reduce your cost by not starting from scratch. Check out TemplateMonster.com! We are not ashamed to say that a lot of our web designs come pre-designed - from templatemonster.com or other template sites, from looking at competitive sites that the client likes or "super templates" that are really website builders in their own right. It's easy to see why. After I change the logo and the graphics and the content, the site is almost un-recognizable relative to its origin. You can get that new website feel without gouging your wallet.

That said: if you want or need custom graphic design for your new webiste, we have some of the best. We partner with graphic designers both local and national. To keep the costs low, we don't markup their costs. They know how to work with us and they bill our clients directly for their work. Very often, our custom web design solutions are STILL cheaper than our competition because we don't deal with overhead. 

OPTIMIZED WEB DESIGN

We can optimize a site as we build it. Our copy writers are tuned in to our SEO process and work with us on keyword optimized content. This is very often an afterthought with most web design companies and that can be a huge mistake. When Google detects new web pages, those pages get indexed immediatly for content. We spend as much time on the optimization as we do on the graphic design because when the site comes out of the gate, we want to make sure you hit the ground running.