Our Web Design Philosophy? Web Design and development is a skill set that reaches all areas of digital marketing. Your company’s website not only serves as a first impression to potential clients and customers but also serves as the framework from which you can build a comprehensive digital strategy.
We create websites off of the WordPress content management system. This allows for an unlimited range of customization. It also allows you to own your website completely. We think that you should be able to edit your website and not feel held hostage to an agency any time you want to make even the most minor edits.
We believe in accessibility, stunning design, and user-experience-based websites that not only make a stunning first impression but also help naturally convert visitors into leads, clients, and customers.
USER EXPERIENCE
User experience is the most important aspect of web design and web development. Often abbreviated as UX/UI, user experience and user interface design needs to be the primary focus of any website build.
Of course, UX/UI is made up of several different parts. We work tirelessly to create sites that help visitors accomplish their goals for visiting your site and your company’s goals for having a website. Check out our UX/UI process to see how GriffinWink is constantly working in your best interest.
RESPONSIVE
In 2017, traffic from mobile devices overtook desktop traffic for the first time. Each year since then, mobile traffic has gained more market share in web traffic. What does this mean?
In short, your website needs to look just as good and operate just as well on a mobile phone as it does on a desktop computer or laptop. We do not incorporate responsiveness as a second thought during our web design process. It is a primary focus.
As we create content, text copy, custom code, and general architecture of your website we constantly keep how sites would operate from a smartphone or tablet at the forefront of our minds.
Sometimes responsive design means creating entirely separate pages that are only triggered when smaller screen size is detected. Other times, it means ensuring the overall structure of rows and columns can quickly adapt and vertically stack for smaller screen devices.
Outside of general structure, we ensure our headers and menus can easily collapse to respond to differing screen sizes. This assures easy navigation that still walks visitors to the information they seek.
Contact buttons that trigger phone calls and emails throughout a mobile view help create conversions. Mobile users commonly have different intentions when visiting web pages than desktop visitors; it is our job to understand this intent and design for it. Let’s take a look at user intent a bit more.
USER INTENT
When an individual finds your website through Google, or social media, or visits it directly, they have a specific intent. Depending on where their acquisition came from and the nature of your company’s industry, this intent can be interpreted and designed around.
Proper web design considers the user’s intent and helps them achieve the information they are searching for in as few clicks as possible. If your company offers a service such as lawn care, plumbing, or auto repair, and a visitor finds your website through Google, it is safe to assume they need the specific service you offer.
Therefore you want to quickly present precisely the services you offer, accessible contact information such as a click-to-call button, and testimonials that demonstrate reliability and value.
If a visitor finds your website through social media, based on an ad campaign where your business is running a promotion, it is safe to assume their main focus in visiting your site was specifically for the campaign you were running.
Therefore that social link should take visitors directly to a landing page that gives them information on the promotion that is being advertised as well as steps to take to redeem the offer and contact your company.
Interpreting user intent through a series of analytical measures is key to ensuring your website is designed and operating properly. People no longer want to search for the information they seek.
If a website is poorly designed or overly complicated, they will likely just exit and continue on to the following search result on Google or resume browsing their social news feed.
INTUITIVE WEB DESIGN
Intuitive web design helps your website feel natural for visitors to navigate through. Intuitive web design is achieved when users find the information they seek while also achieving your company’s goals.
While user intent and experience are incredibly important, both focus on keeping the visitor happy. This is important, but happy visitors who are not converted into leads or customers have wasted opportunities.
At GriffinWink, we ensure that our web designers help visitors come to natural points throughout your website where they can take the next step of becoming a lead and/or customer.
Intuitive web design goes beyond click funnels. As a visitor clicks through your website, the goal is to build a relationship. This is done by providing excellent content and answering questions they didn’t even know they had.
Our copywriters work alongside our web developers to ensure that even the text on your website is actively working to create conversions and not existing only to fill space.
IN HOUSE DESIGN
GriffinWink Advertising is a full-service advertising agency. This means we provide all of our services in-house. This includes video production, photography, and graphic design. Our team can create incredible synergy by never outsourcing our work in either digital or traditional advertising. This benefits you, especially in the area of web design.
A website needs to be captivating. Color schemes, fonts, imagery, and video assets must work together to create a cohesive branded theme that is pleasing and natural to visitors. Find out how our team operates together to create visually stunning websites.
CUSTOM CODING
While WordPress and its thousands of powerful themes have near endless possibilities, sometimes that just isn’t enough. Just like some cars require tinkering under the hood to make them as robust as possible, sometimes we need to dig into the raw code of websites to make them operate at their top potential.
Our talented web developers use their extensive coding knowledge to create awe-inspiring moving designs. These designs can respond to how you move your mouse on the screen, scroll through the site, and more.
If you want to load your website full of high-resolution content galleries, we can create customized themes which give loading priority to the structure of your site before images to assure you are not penalized for page loading speeds.
In the past, we have created custom search features for maps of different markets, long-form conditional logic-based quizzes and forms, and multiple backend dashboards allowing clients to log in and edit things such as real estate listings without potentially editing content they need not have access to.
With our team at GriffinWink, the possibilities are endless.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Graphic Design is one of the most important aspects of web design. When you come to GriffinWink for a website estimate, one of the first things we do is bring our different departments together to brainstorm as a team.
During this period, existing media assets are reviewed. We review your company’s logo, pictures you have, existing advertisements, and more to start to understand how your brand operates.
From there, we begin to select color schemes that leave a lasting impression but also are easy to read and ADA compliant. We take existing aspects, create design features around their general feel, and ensure that your website does not look flat and boring.
Starting a project together and constant communication between our web and graphics departments creates an environment where solutions are discovered before problems arise.
VIDEO PRODUCTION
Our in-house production team can make stunning highlight reels to feature on your website as the header content. This is a great way to catch visitors’ attention while connecting with them immediately.
A website only featuring static content sometimes seems dull, and featuring short video clips can capture 15 to 30 seconds of your visitor’s attention. The first 30 seconds a visitor spends on your website are crucial; during this time, most bounces occur. When rich media pull someone in, they are much more likely to look around after committing their attention.
Our production team can do on-site shoots, aerial drone videography of your business, or even take your existing video content and create something entirely new. Our web team can then take the video assets and structure your website to assure that adding video content doesn’t slow down the loading speed of your homepage.
ADA COMPLIANT
The American Disability Act establishes a set of guidelines that depending on what industry you operate in, your website must follow. If not, you risk getting sued in civil court by an individual who could not navigate your website due to their disability.
The ADA has several requirements for websites to meet. These include options to increase the size of the text on the website or change the color scheme if the text is not easily read on a colored background and options for those who cannot read or see well, such as videos or buttons that trigger voice dictation.
The ADA also suggests keeping content accessible by making important information easy to find, having clear data collection privacy policies, and offering options to turn off moving aspects of your website for those who suffer from disorders such as epilepsy.
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility is a word you will most likely see more and more lately. In terms of web design, accessibility can mean two very different things. It can refer to being compliant with the standards that the American Disability Act put in place to make sure your website is accessible to all audiences.
It can also mean that your website is built to allow anyone, regardless of web design experience, to make fundamental changes. At GriffinWink, we pride ourselves on designing a website that does both.
EASY TO USE BACKEND
The other side of accessibility comes from a personal belief of GriffinWink that our websites should be able to be edited by anyone with the proper access. We create the backend of our websites in a user-friendly format where knowledge of coding isn’t necessary to make fundamental changes.
We have heard horror stories of clients paying large sums of money to receive a website they can not understand how to operate. In essence, this leaves them with only one option – paying the agency which built the site every time they need anything added or edited on their site.
With GriffinWink, you have choices. We can teach you how to make website edits, or you can easily have us do them for you. It is this choice that makes the world of difference. Our websites are accessible to our clients because you paid for them, you own them, and you should have all the control you desire.
PROJECTS OF ANY SCALE
Not all websites are created equal. Sometimes clients come to us with enormous requests for very specific functionalities. We create websites that operate in unusual ways or include very highly technical features that cost more; we have the talent and capability to create almost anything you are looking to have on your website.
In the past, we have created everything from e-commerce websites that offer thousands of customized able offerings to websites with a series of frontend user dashboards that give those who log in different access to features.
Working with national and local clients, we have the experience necessary to make anything you have in your mind a reality. You can rest assured that at GriffinWink, we will never turn down a project due to complex requests.
