WEBSITE DESIGN PORTFOLIO
WEB DESIGNERS IN TORONTO. OUR BEST TIPS TO HELP YOU CHOOSE THE RIGHT WEB DESIGN COMPANY FOR YOUR BUSINESS.
How Much Does A Website Cost?
For most small businesses in Toronto, a website can cost anywhere from $1793 - $3793 from start to end of the project. For more details and specific deliverables, see our website design prices page for an accurate breakdown. For e-commerce websites, we have a separate package and can be entirely customized for your specific needs. If you are an enterprise-level business and want something built on Word Press, we can certainly provide you with a quote, after learning more about your business and your goals.
Benefits of Working with A Full-Service Agency
As a small business owner that’s just getting started, you will most likely need a web designer in Toronto and some form of online marketing to help you get steady clients to your business. A website on its own, is pretty much useless without the proper marketing in place. That’s where we come in. We provide full-service web design and online marketing solutions to business owners so that you can focus on doing what you do best. We take care of every single detail of your online presence and for the past 8 years, we’ve gotten pretty good at it. It can be difficult to know how to choose a web designer in Toronto, hopefully, the content we wrote on this page can give you a good idea on what you should look for in a web designer and what types of questions you should ask before hiring a web designer.
The Best Web Design Platforms
There are several different types of websites. For example coded websites, cloud-based websites and e-commerce websites. For most local businesses that sell services, we recommend cloud-based websites because it’s faster for us to set it up, and cloud-based solutions come with amazing design features and SEO features that make it easy for small business owners to manage themselves, once the website is complete. WordPress websites or custom coded websites, you will most likely need a developer to make updates to your website. We generally recommend WordPress websites to enterprise-level businesses, especially those that need advanced software integrations and systems.
For businesses that primarily focus on selling products online, we usually recommend ECWID or Shopify, these are the most famous platforms with the best features that allow business owners to have a fully functioning e-commerce website, that is similar in calibre to the same level of system that is being used by large multinational corporations. If you are still unsure on which platform might be the best for you, reach out to our web designers in Toronto and we can give you our best suggestions for your specific business needs.
The Right Marketing for Your Website
Some of the best ways to market online include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads and of course SEO. However, some strategies might work better than others for certain businesses. Generally speaking, for high ticket products and service, we recommend Google Ads, for e-commerce, we recommend Google Shopping ads or Facebook/Instagram Ads. By working with so many different types of businesses in the last few years, we generally know which platforms work best for certain industries. Feel free to get in touch with our web designers in Toronto for a professional opinion on which marketing channel will work best for your specific business.
How Good Design Makes You More Money
Believe it or not, how your website looks will influence how your customers will perceive your brand. If your website looks old and outdated, customers will be less likely to fill out a lead form or purchase something from your website. Regardless of what business you are in, you need to look at your top competitor website and see the caliber of website they have, ideally, you want to build something that looks as good as their website or better. Spending money on marketing is useless if your website doesn’t look good and can’t convert website visitors into paying customers. Reach out to our web designers in Toronto and we can send you a link to our most recent portfolio of websites we launched.
Make Sure You Have A Contract
Before our clients hire our web designers in Toronto, we always have our clients sign a contract that break down exactly what we will be doing for their business, we want to be crystal clear on what our role is and transparent on our deliverables.
This also lets customers know of their own responsibilities as well, for example, providing us with the necessary content, login access and follow a payment schedule. Avoid working with web designers in Toronto that don’t have contracts, simply because it’s harder to keep them accountable for certain tasks if there is no agreement on paper.
How To Name Your Website
You want to name your brand carefully because you don’t want to use a name that’s already being used in your industry. Simply Google the term you want to use if there are any competing companies that are using the same brand name as you. If you don’t find any companies with the same name and same domain as you, you are good to go. You can also check your local government website to see if a company name is legally registered. When it comes to buying domains, you want to purchase the .com and .ca version of the domain, especially if you operate in North America.
If you are based in Europe, you might want to register the .com and the appropriate European domain extension as well. This will ensure that no other website can purchase the same domain as you and compete with you on the first page of Google. The last thing you want to happen is, you work hard, spend a lot of money on ads, and people end up going to the wrong website. If you need help choosing a domain name, reach out to our web designers in Toronto for a professional opinion.
Reliable Hosting
Think of hosting like real estate, you want to have the best location possible and with the right infrastructure in place to make sure that your organization can run smoothly. We prefer using Amazon Web Servers as our preferred hosting provider because they offer super fast website load speed. Since it’s Amazon, you know they will always have the best hardware powering your website. Of course, they also have the best security in the world, so your website is always safe from potential hackers.
Product Based Best Practices
If you have a product-based business, be sure to take amazing photographs of your work, terrible pictures mean loss of sales for your e-commerce business or brick and mortar. Photography makes a huge impact on your website conversions.
Make the effort to get the best photography possible on your website. If you look at your top competitors, chances are their website will look stunning and have amazing photography. You want to be in a position where your website looks equal to or better than their website.
Service-Based Best Practises
For service-based businesses, it’s harder to get photography of your work with the exception of a few industries. However, for the vast majority of industries, you can go online to professional stock photography websites and purchase high-quality images for your website.
They typically cost $0.50 cents or more, depending on the package you purchase. Below this content, we will have links of some of the best stock photography websites, both paid and free versions. In all of our website packages, our web designers actually choose stock photos on your behalf which is a huge time saver for you as a business owner.
Importance of Video Production
Having a video on your website helps people to connect with your business on a whole other level. Think of it from a customer's perspective, they search online for a local business and out of 3 websites they come across. One of them has a cool video that introduces the business, it’s products and services and even goes in-depth on giving customers more information on which products or services they should choose based on their needs.
Building A Website Yourself VS Hiring An Agency
It is totally possible to build your own website from scratch. There are so many great tools and platforms to choose from with unlimited possibilities. However most business owners simply don’t have the time, energy or focus to sit down on a laptop for 2-3 weeks straight, figuring out which website platform to choose. How to build content that your audience will enjoy, how to plan the right design that would work best with your audience and much more.
Building your own website is better suited for young entrepreneurs who have lots of time for trial and error, however, for most businesses, this is really hard to pull off because you have so many other tasks that get in your way from building your own website. It might be more time-efficient to just hire a web designer in Toronto to handle the whole process for you, so that you can focus on closing deals and focusing on your business.
Website Security
We had a client that recently came to us with a website and asked us to help them with marketing. After carefully examining their website we noticed that some links on their website would sometimes redirect to random spammy websites, we realized that the website security was compromised. When we asked them who built their website, they mentioned that they had someone work on it from an overseas company.
Not that overseas companies can’t do a great job, but you really need to know how to find reliable companies to do business with. Google will lower your rankings if the see that your website has malware, and if you have Google Ads running, they will disable all of your ads until you get this issue resolved. We, later on, had their website HTTPS secured and we ended up switching the hosting provider to a more reputable company.
The best thing you can do for a new website is to have it secured with HTTPS, its very low cost, usually $20 bucks for the year or sometimes free, depending on the platform you choose. Having your website secured helps your website rank better on Google and protects your customers from potentially getting viruses or malware or worse, having their personal information hacked.
How Good-Looking Websites Impact Your Business
People respond well to great design, having a great looking website, logo and overall graphic design on your website will help you wow your future customers that are visiting your business for the first time. People, in general, will always be more attracted to better-looking websites when it comes to making a buying decision. If your website looks ugly, they will most likely click the back button within 5 seconds of being on your website. The more time people spend on your website, the higher the chance of them doing business with your company vs the competitor. If you need help choosing a design for your new website, reach out to our web designers in Toronto for some great suggestions.
Hire Full-Service Marketing Companies
Hiring web designer in Toronto is not enough to position you for success, although it does play an important role. Having the right marketing in place is another key factor in determining the success of your business. You need to work with a reputable company that can help you build an amazing looking website and the right digital marketing strategy to bring visitors to your website. Currently, the best ways to market your website are on Google ads/SEO, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
We highly recommend you to work with an agency that can help you longterm with your marketing efforts, this will save you a lot of stress from having to manage multiple companies to achieve the same goal. It's better to have 1 company handle everything for you so that there is no conflict between companies in the event of mixed ideas and disagreements. The last thing you want to do is manage multiple people. In our web design agency, you have 1 person to consult with and that person takes care of everything for you as your primary point of contact.
Social Media
As a business owner, you may not like social media but unfortunately, it’s part of business culture to be on social media. One of the deciding factors customers use to decide on which company they want to do business with is social media. Your future customer will evaluate your brand on how good your website looks, your content, your reviews, portfolio and prices and lastly, they will look at your social media to see if you have an active presence. By not having a presence on social media, you create doubt in your customers' minds as to why you don’t have a presence.
If your competitor has a great presence on social media, it could impact your ability to attract new leads and customers into your business. Make an effort to work on your social media, regardless if you hire a company to do this for you or have us work on it. Having active content being posted, lets customers know that you exist and are a legit company to do business with.
Great Customer Service
Although having an amazing website and the best online marketing strategies can help you tremendously with your business, you still need to be able to have amazing presentation skills, customer service skills and know-how to handle objections.
Regardless of what you sell with the exception of e-commerce, you and your team need to know how to sell and close deals. After years of doing online marketing for businesses all over the GTA, we learned that our clients with amazing sales professionals always ended up getting more use out of our marketing efforts.
If you need help getting your website launched and want to have a customized marketing strategy, reach out to our team of web designers in Toronto for a consultation.
Here Are the Best Resources of Tools, Links & Free Business Training Links for Business Owners
Free Stock Photography Resources
https://www.gratisography.com/
Paid Stock Photography Resources
https://www.bigstockphoto.com/
Best SEO Blogs For Free Training
Neil Patel: https://neilpatel.com/blog/
The Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog
Search Engine Journal: https://searchengineland.com/
Search Engine Roundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/
SEMRush Blog: https://www.semrush.com/blog/
Yoast Blog: https://yoast.com/seo-blog/
Google Web Master Central: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
Content Marketing Institute: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/topic/seo/
Search Engine Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/
Quick Sprout: https://www.quicksprout.com/blog/
Backlinko: https://backlinko.com/blog
GotchSEO: https://www.gotchseo.com/blog/
Best Web Design Blogs for Free Business Education
Smashing Magazine: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
Web Design Depot: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
Site Point: https://www.sitepoint.com/
Tutorial Zine: https://tutorialzine.com/
Scotch.io: https://scotch.io/
Designs Shack: https://designshack.net/
Best YouTube Channels For Entrepreneurs
Sunny Lenarduzzi: https://www.youtube.com/user/SunnyLenarduzzi/about
Dan Lok: https://www.youtube.com/user/vanentrepreneurgroup
Grant Cardone: https://www.youtube.com/user/GrantCardone
Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/user/neilvkpatel
Gary Vee: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOEMEjL1GBJ41uCWur5VXWQ
Patrick Bet David: https://www.youtube.com/user/patrickbetdavid
Sam Ovens: https://www.youtube.com/user/samovenstv
Silicon Valley Girl: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiq1FIgtEK7LRAOB1JXTPig
Graham Stephan: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV6KDgJskWaEckne5aPA0aQ
Entrepreneur Magazine: https://www.youtube.com/user/EntrepreneurOnline
Content Editing Tools & Plagiarism Protection
Grammarly: https://app.grammarly.com/
Duplicate Checker: https://www.duplichecker.com/
How to Get Your Website HTTPS Enabled
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
GoDaddy SSL Certificate Purchase: https://ca.godaddy.com/web-security/ssl-certificate
Social Media Profile Creation
Facebook Business Page Setup: https://www.facebook.com/business/pages/set-up
Instagram Business Page Setup: https://business.instagram.com/getting-started
LinkedIn Business Page Setup: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/linkedin-pages
Pinterest Business Page Setup: https://business.pinterest.com/en/creating-your-account
Twitter Business Page Setup: https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/create-a-twitter-business-profile.html
Business Directory Listings
Google My Business: https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/
Yelp Business Listing: https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/
Yellow Pages Listing: https://business.yellowpages.ca/onboarding/#/search
Apple Maps Listing: https://mapsconnect.apple.com/
Better Business Bureau: https://www.bbb.org/en/us
Angies List: http://angieslist.com/
Yahoo Local: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local
Manta: http://manta.com/
N49: http://n49.com/
Best SEO Tools For Your Website
SEM RUSH: https://www.semrush.com/
Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Ahrefs Backlink Checker: https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
Yoast SEO Tools: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Keyword Everywhere: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
Image Compression Tool: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
Google Analytics: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
Google Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Best Video Editing Software
Camtasia: https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
Final Cut Pro: https://www.apple.com/ca/final-cut-pro/
Adobe Premiere Pro: https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/premiere.html
Best Networking Event Apps For Your Business
Meetup: http://meetup.com
Event Bright: https://www.eventbrite.ca
BNI: https://www.bni.com
Legal Policy Generator for Your Website – Always consult your lawyer before uploading any legal documents to your website
Privacy Policy Generator: https://www.shopify.ca/tools/policy-generator
GDPR Policy Generator: https://www.gdprprivacynotice.com
Refund Policy Generator: https://www.shopify.ca/tools/policy-generator/refund
Cookie Policy Generator: https://www.cookiepolicygenerator.com
Terms of Service Policy Generator: https://www.shopify.ca/tools/policy-generator/terms-and-conditions
Best Websites to Buy Your Domain & Tools
GoDaddy: https://ca.godaddy.com
NameCheap: https://www.namecheap.com
Dynadot: https://www.dynadot.com
Google Domains: https://domains.google/intl/en_ca/
Best Payment Processors
Stripe: https://stripe.com/en-ca
Square: https://squareup.com/ca/en
Shopify Payments: https://www.shopify.ca/payments