Seriously Great Web Design

We craft web designs for growth oriented companies worldwide.

Reno Web Design Agency Doing Business Worldwide

Web design that's fast, responsive and beautiful.

Web design in itself isn’t a goal. Your real goal should be attracting new customers. Your website needs to make your business more competitive and ultimately more valuable. We're here to help you do that.

Chances are you already have some idea what you want your website to look like, and what you need to say about your company. Turning your website vision into an actual web design should be routine for any reasonably good designer. However, there are big differences among web designers. Some web designers are incredibly gifted, while others… …not so much.

How to choose a web designer

A good web designer should understand business and Internet strategies as much as web design itself. According to one study, 75% of consumers judge a company’s credibility based on its website design. Another indicates that 88% of consumers that search for a business will visit it or call within 24 hours after a good website experience. What this means is you can’t afford to get it wrong.

Interestingly, site speed and sound design fundamentals, branding and device compatibility are top priorities among website users. Good web design means every element makes the web experience better. Your web designer needs to build a website for your customers and avoid the urge to push boundaries based on the latest technology or to impress other designers.

Website Designs that Function

Web development extends beyond design. It is the engineering process of making websites capable of selling things, booking appointments, renting rooms, keeping track of customers…. you name it. Very few designers are engineers, but many call themselves developers anyway.

Web development is a big deal, and getting it wrong can be devastating in both real costs and opportunity cost. OCG Creative is an engineering firm. We don’t play word games and we don’t overstate our capabilities. We simply do good work.

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We are beyond proud to have had the honor of rebranding Ultralight Control Systems, as well as handling the design and development of thier new website.

Website speed is key: Your web design must support performance.

A lot of web design agencies in Reno take months to build a simple website. What sucks about that is (a) the opportunity cost of living with what you have*, and (b) more hours spent in development typically drives up the actual cost in real dollars. Beyond that, dragging projects out is miserable anyway, so it is best not to get stuck in that situation.

Opportunity cost is an important thing to recognize. Presumably, the reason you are looking for a new website is to fill an online need that’s not being met. Business goals vary, but it’s a safe bet you want more customers to spend more money with you, more often. Many factors, aside from design, are critical when engineering a for-profit web experience.

You have to be very careful. There’s no absolute way to know if a design is any good until it has been published to the Internet. This presents a bit of a chicken and egg problem we are very used to dealing with. We build heat maps and record live visitor sessions to learn what interests actual visitors to your website. The advantage of knowing over guessing is impossible to overstate.

*Assuming a new website will perform better than your old one, which is not always the case.

This isn't exactly a marketing strategy, but we do like it a lot.

Web design made for doing business

If your goal is to make money with your website, it makes sense to verify that’s really happening. Here’s a one question quiz:

Question 1: Your Website Has Just Gone Live, Do You…?

Pop open a beer and check “new website” off your todo list.

Sit back and hope it works.

Utilize data to verify the best possible user experience, conversion rate, effectiveness of your CTA’s, etc., then make course corrections to continually improve rankings and visitor data until it grows to become a money factory for your company.

Let’s Analyze Each Answer:

Unless you have a medical condition or personal issue, we are advocates of the beer part. However, while sampling the suds may improve your outlook (and make you funny and attractive), your website is never done. We can’t predict the future and it is a moving target anyway. Even with the best intentions, a new website can do a lot of harm if you get it wrong. Walking away now is like waiting in line at an amusement park and never getting on the ride. Take the ride.

A wise leader once said, “hope is not a strategy.” Hope is good. Dreams are good. Puppies are good. A good book and a walk on the beach—all good. None of these will do a thing to make your website pay off. It is better to have a strategy and a plan and work it until you get the result you want. Trust us. We’ve done this before.

While this is the best answer, even this is a partial list. Your website is never done. Things change. You learn. We learn. Learning, working, changing and growing, and beer and puppies and walks on the beach. That’s how you make a successful website, plus a more profitable company and comfortable work-life balance.

Don’t guess. Design a Better User Experience.

Guessing isn’t any more of a web design strategy than hope is. Guessing is fine if you have a jar full of jelly beans and a car to win. When it comes to your business, not so much. One of the reasons for our short web design and development cycle is to get your website published and returning data as quickly as possible.

It is one thing to use knowledge and experience to set baseline design principles. After all, we know that certain words, pictures and their quality, or the placement of menu items have well-established norms based on years of accumulated information. It is prudent to use what we already know to establish guard rails. In other words, you have to start somewhere.

What you don’t want is to be emotionally attached to a design idea to the point where you cling to it no matter what. Around here, we often use the term “data-driven design.” In some circles, data-driven design is catching on as a buzzword because it sounds cool and smart. There isn’t really a defined standard for what is and what is not data-driven design, and consequently, many agencies that claim to do it don’t even know what it means.

Data-driven web design

The amazing thing about the Internet is we have the ability to accumulate data from just about anything that happens online. This provides a massive body of information that gives us the ability to know exactly how your website development will affect the experiences of your users. You are probably familiar with primary website metrics like the number of visitors, the ratio of those that are new versus returning, bounce rate, time on site, etc. These are great but not very useful for knowing which parts of your website are actually contributing to your goals.

Much better is the ability to see real human users interact with the pages on your site—to actually track mouse movements, scrolling and clicks. We call this session recording and it is an eye-opener. Similarly, we use heat maps representing cumulative mouse clicks, scroll and movement information as a roadmap for wording or placement of assent and information on your live webpages. Used along with other advanced tracking metrics, we can tell exactly what interests visitors and motivates them to take action. More importantly, we get instant feedback from real customers to guide Internet design decisions.

A website design experience you’ll love!

Web design isn't hard. It's strategy and planning that poses challenges. Web designers screw it up all the time by focusing on the wrong things. All we care about is designing fast, elegant websites that are easy to navigate and fun to browse.

On top of that, we're fast. We don't waste your budget on a bunch of crap that your website visitors (i.e. your customers) don't care about. We also try not to waste time by starting every single website as though we've never written a line of code before. About 70% of any WordPress website uses a common code base, so we start there. That doesn't include the CMS itself. Our approach is to build what's different, rather than rebuild the same thing over and over.

We also take care of all the challenging parts. It is always best to use unique images, especially photos, so we will ask you for pictures before resorting to stock. We can also schedule a photo shoot, or series of photo shoots anywhere in the world. Sometimes, we can talk about what images would be best to tell your story and simply give you a shot list that you take around and fill yourself. We honestly love working that way because it gets us on the same page photo-wise and doesn't run up your budget. In any case, we'll take care of the photo editing.

Often, a bottle neck pops up with copywriting. We like to produce a lot of page content. That's contrary to what a lot of web designers will tell you is best. However, upwards of 90% of the webpages you'll find on Google's first page has over 2,000 words. Don't let any web designer convince you to cut down and consolidate web copy without a quantifiable good reason. Taking away words is almost always bad for rankings (SEO).

For the actual writing, we look to you to provide the main points for any topics that's important to your business and your customers or clients. We know a lot about some industries, but others not so much. Either way, you'll always be the true expert about your business, so we're looking to you to be our guide. That said, we'll do all the actual writing unless writing happens to be your thing. If it is, we'll take your copy and optimize it for page formatting and SEO.

The important thing is we are a team. We all have unique abilities and areas of expertise that we want to make the most of.