Website Development

Of course you want your business website to match the website address you’ve used for years, correct? Don’t fall victim to using a URL that a company purchases for you. Many times some website salespeople will try and convince you that using a keyword rich URL will have SEO benefit. The problem is if they use a different URL, it will only serve to confuse the search engines, and you’ll probably never own the URL they buy for you. What happens if down the road you cancel their services? Who’s job is it going to be to go all over the net and clean up the mess of a wrong website address everywhere? With City Ranked, we will use your existing URL.

Having a responsive design website is probably one of 2015’s biggest SEO ranking factors as compared to years past. Having a website that responds using website code (CSS) to reconfigure itself based upon the device accessing it is Google’s recommended option when it comes to designing for mobile. Unless you have a very specific need for a mobile website, don’t be tricked into buying one of these. There are a whole bunch of reasons to not do a mobile website, but isn’t enough that Google says not to do it? 1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration. City Ranked keeps up with the latest in Google standards, specifically with fully responsive web design.

This question should weed out any organizations that contract to have their websites built overseas. You as a business owner should want to talk to the person that is building your website. No doubt they have built tens, maybe even hundreds of websites and will have constructive criticism on design elements as well as layout ideas. City Ranked has an in-house team of web developers that will build your website.

The content on your website is probably the single most important task to complete. The content will sell you as a company, what makes you different, and why people should choose your business. It is also one of the biggest factors the search engines will grade your website on when it comes to SEO. Many professional web design companies offer content development services. At City Ranked, we offer content development.

This can be a tough question for a small business owner to judge answers on. SEO can be complicated if you don’t know the basics. Ask the web design company to show you other websites that they have built and have them explain the SEO that was built into those. Ask them to show you their code and what they will do differently on your website. Trust your intuition, if it doesn’t feel or sound right, get bids from some other companies and ask them the same things. At City Ranked, we put SEO first! For more information – check out our SEO services.

This is an important question to ask and will separate amateur website companies from the professional. Amateur website companies use drag and drop website building programs, many times because they outsource their web design to overseas companies. If the company uses a drag and drop interface you should really consider the limitations of these systems before investing money into them. If you want to learn more about the limitations of drag and drop, you can read about it here. At City Ranked we mostly use WordPress for our websites because of the ease to train our clients on use of the program.

Understanding fee structure and costs for changes to your website down the road can save on surprises. Asking questions like if you can make simple changes yourself if they provide a CMS (content management system) on their websites, and if you can get FTP access. You may think you don’t want or need these things, but you never know. Most people never read their owner's manual when they buy a new car, but you never know when it could come in handy. For more information about our pricing plan, click here!