Web Design & Development FAQ
Web design and development always starts with information gathering. We want to know what the goal(s) of your site will be, what kind of elements meet your branding needs, and the functionality that will help your website become the best tool possible for your company.
After this, the planning and design process begins. Based on your feedback during information gathering, our team creates a site design and architecture that fits your user journey(s). Once design elements are approved, we develop a customized website that is in line with your company culture and values. The choice of your website’s design theme and build tools is based on your requirements and also those that ensure optimal SEO, such as site speed, indexing, tagging, and more.
During and after the development process, the product is internally tested and sent to you for approvals. At this point, we also implement all-important 1 to 1 redirects (similar to mail forwarding) for any path names that have changed on the new website.
Once everything has been reviewed and works perfectly, your new website is launched and tested. Testing includes not only visual testing, but also functional testing. This ensures your CTA’s are working and that monitoring software is functioning correctly.
If desired, we can host your website on our fast and secure platform and keep it maintained to ensure that everything continues to meet your expectations.
Websites should be redesigned every 3 to 4 years, though it depends heavily on your industry and preferences. Even if a site is not fully redesigned, it should continue to be updated with design elements and features to stay current with web technology and as your company’s needs change.
Top Of The List-designed websites offer some unique features that other developers might not include. Here are just some of the things you’ll receive from a Top Of The List-built website:
Built for SEO. Since we started as strictly an SEO company, our attention to building SEO into all websites we create is far greater than most other developers. While they may say “Oh yes, our sites include SEO” what they might be saying is: “We’ll add title and meta descriptions”, or worse, an inexpensive plugin that does SEO automatically. There’s a lot more that goes into a site that is technically well-designed for SEO: site loading speed, heading formats, search engine “readability” of content, and more.
Another SEO concern on a redesigned website occurs when page names or paths change. Without appropriate SEO strategies in place, the SEO that was built up on the original web page(s) can be lost forever once the new site is launched. Have you ever wondered why your site lost so much traffic after that last web redesign, even though it looks so good? Now you know why. That instance will not occur, or be influenced very little, with a Top Of The List-developed website.
Latest design trends. Next, our designers and developers are consistently learning the newest and most up-to-date design features for websites. Top Of The List consistently supports the cost of team training and education, and much of the time spent in training itself–on a weekly basis!
Smaller team, more attention to your goals. Finally, we’re a smaller team and give utmost attention to you and your business needs. You receive consulting on how to best market your products or services on your website for your users, along with SEO needs and/or effects on the choices that are made. Competitor sites, colors, logo, and a lot more go into the presentation piece.
It won’t if Top Of The List performs the redesign. On the other hand, when an agency does not migrate a website from an old site to a new site using appropriate SEO strategies, it will most definitely lose placement. Search engines index every page on a website and their algorithms determine placement.
When redesigning a site, the URLs of those pages often change and are no longer indexed. In addition, the SEO value of the old pages is lost unless they are dealt with correctly when the redesigned site launches.