San Diego Web Development Agency

The first step to creating a web development strategy is to take out all of the guesswork. Your potential customers are already on the web looking for you. By examining the market, we can understand your customers user journeys and discover what your potential customers want to find on your website.

Your San Diego web developer is responsible for creating a website you will be satisfied with—that fulfills your goals, that represents your brand well, and that will last into the future. Our website team aligns our goals with your needs. We interview every stakeholder to discover their desires and expectations, building consensus and internal confidence around the project.    

A website doesn’t just exist—it exists in the context of your brand. When properly designed, it supports the brand and can become one of the most powerful tools to build a brand. For companies that haven’t solidified their brand strategy, we use our San Diego web development process as a chance to scrutinize everything from brand purpose and brand strategy to content style and design systems. 

A website is essentially a package of features—what does the website do? Common features include a search function, blog, Ecommerce, user accounts, and chat support. Basically anything you expect to see when you visit a website produced by a reputable company. Part of the planning phase of San Diego web development is to brainstorm features for your website and prioritize them—which ones are essential, and which can wait for an update later.

A website is a collection of features, and each feature is a way to deliver content. According to Forresters, most users will look at over 11 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. We start by taking an inventory of the content you already have, considering what can be repurposed, what needs to be updated or upgraded, and what content doesn’t serve you.

To craft a brand message and communicate it with content, you have to know who you are talking to and how they want to communicate. User personas are avatars for your idealized user. They come with names and pictures, defined by their demographics, occupation, income, hobbies, pain points, etc. You can then craft content with your user persona as the target audience.  

We started the content process with an audit of your current content. This was to determine the existing content you have. Now we need to make a list of the content you need. A gap analysis compares the two lists to see how far the wishlist is from the content inventory. Any required piece of content you don’t already have must be created.

Your content may be written by a number of people, but at the end of the day, a brand has to speak with one voice. Every piece of content a user encounters should read like it was written in the same voice. A “style guide” establishes the particulars of the brand voice—if it’s formal or informal, the reading level, guidelines for punctuation, bulleted lists, etc.

A website prototype is a working digital model of the website—not live for users to see and may not include functional features. The prototype gives stakeholders and customers an approximation of the digital experience. We use prototypes to get feedback, identify problems, and brainstorm areas for improvement.

The design phase of website development process addresses how the site & pages should be structured. This is what your potential customers will see when they arrive at your website and what features they interact with. “UX” is short for “user experience.” It puts the user in the driver’s seat and designs websites with their preferences and expectations in mind. When you think of a website as “user-friendly,” you’re looking at good UX.

A picture is worth 1,000 words, and a delightful animation is worth even more. Web developers walk a fine line with animations and illustrations. Visual assets can slow a website down if overused, and different illustrations and animations can become outdated or even rely on obsolete technology. The goal of animations and illustrations are to make instructions or messaged easier to understand.

Whereas a style guide establishes the “brand voice” of your company’s written content, design systems are a style guide for the visual presentation of your website. They establish brand rules like official colors, fonts, imagery, shape, and more. Just as a style guide allows any writer to adopt the brand voice, design systems will allow any visual artist (web designers included) to adopt your brand’s visual style.

A web app is more than a website—it’s an actual software application hosted on a web server rather than on a local disk drive. This could be as simple as a loan calculator, or as complicated as a video-editing platform. Development of a web application requires extra effort in ideating features, selecting the programming strategy, and addressing application security.

Since more than half of all web browsing takes place on mobile devices, responsive design is a must. Gone are the days of “one size fits all” web design. A modern website must anticipate a variety of display sizes—the cinematic sprawl of a desktop monitor, the upright bookmark shape of a smartphone, and everything in between. A responsive website adapts to any screen size and still looks beautiful.

A website must do more than exist—it must be found through search engines. Search engines like Google map the web and form an index of the sites they find. Search engine indexing is not a guarantee. Your site may only be partially indexed, or not indexed at all. Proper web development makes the site easy for search engine algorithms to find.

Data security is big business. Without proper attention to cybersecurity, your website could be vulnerable to attack. Ransomware could hold your company up for a fortune; user data could become exposed leaving your company liable. You could face penalties for regulatory noncompliance. 60% of businesses fail after a cyber attack. Proper attention to cybersecurity keeps you from becoming a part of that dire statistic.

Good web design follows a series of visual patterns. Every assumption should be tested by subjecting it to user feedback. The “A/B test” is one of the most powerful tools for collecting user feedback. An A/B test shows users two versions of a feature. The version they prefer might make the final website, or be tested against other versions with another A/B test.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing your site’s authority and relevance in your niche, so it appears on search engine results pages (SERPs) for high-converting keywords. Some aspects of SEO take place elsewhere on the web, However, a great deal of your domain’s authority depends on its technical profile and content, which means SEO must be considered even in the earliest stages of development.

A website is useless to a business unless it converts—that is, it converts traffic to users, leads, customers, or clients. Marketing collateral helps sales teams do the job of converting prospects. By incorporating marketing collateral into your custom website, your website can greatly optimize your sales.

Nearly everything a user does on a website can be tracked, recorded, and observed after publication. You can measure which pages are most popular, which links users click on the most, the main sources of traffic, and time spent on each page. Analytics process this data into actionable suggestions to optimize the UX.