Business Websites in Inland Empire

Are you sure of what you want to accomplish? Have you explained what you expect for a website to the digital agencies that are bidding your website project?

Are you comparing apples to apples? Building a Ruby on Rails website that has load balancing and can scale out as you add concurrent users is a lot more expensive to build than simply putting up a plain vanilla blogging website. Ongoing maintenance should also be considered. 

Are you overpaying because of the brand name of the agency? Chances are, if you are getting a WordPress website, for example, you should be in a relatively tight range. Almost all of these types of websites are relatively similar in build style, time to build and templating. This means that pricing should be more consistent. If you see large swings in price points, you should ask questions. We can build a simple 8-12 page WordPress website in less than 10 hours with a single employee. Most agencies can do it in less than 20 hours. but our pricing reflects both our reduced timeline, and our advanced skills (and corresponding value/cost). Apples to apples, we are delivering a similar website to the 20 hour website, but in ten hours. 

We offer a lot more in the basic website configuration, however, and the timeline doesn't change. So get it in writing. See what it is you are comparing, and ask questions. Gauge the competency of the agency based on how they answer the questions. We can help you answer any questions you may have about websites.

If, and that is a big if - because most digital agencies don't build complete websites that are ready to operate properly - your website is built properly, you will get some decent traffic and potentially some conversions. But you need to constantly be turning over content, engaging with customers and making small optimizations on your website as you go.

Yes. We build world class e-commerce websites. Our strength lies in the completeness of our deliverable. We do not build a simple shell of a website. 

We also future-proof our E-Commerce website builds. We prioritize headless commerce, and high end integrations so you don't get shoehorned into a slow, hard to manage website structure and can pivot with technology improvements. 

We add significant content and optimize the proper pages and aspects of the website to ensure you actually get traffic and have a reasonable opportunity for conversion.

Make sure you know what to expect from a deliverable when you are contemplating an E-commerce build. Agencies have vastly different ideas about what should be delivered. Make sure that you are getting the type of deliverable you are set up for and comfortable handling. 

The answer to that question can be complex and multi-faceted, but here are some concepts that may make sense to think about when building or revamping a website.

• A website is not just a pretty brochure. It needs to be integrated into real-world channels of marketing, corporate needs and existing infrastructure
• Hosting matters. So does website speed, and security. Don't skimp on any of these.
• If you build your website like a large enterprise does, at the beginning, you are helping your bottom line more than you know. Don't skip out on anything that is legitimately necessary, and which can provide great value in the future, even if it's a bit more money up front
• You will need to use the website. Don't let your agency build you something that is hard to understand, difficult to use or requires undue stress or excessive cost to maintain or update
• Your website is a constantly evolving piece of marketing collateral that will need to be paid attention to
• People, scripts and activists will try to harm your brand even if they don't know you. Protect yourself properly and take ongoing security seriously
• You need to be available, speak up and make clear what your expectations are
• Your agency will not volunteer a lot of information generally, as they are more comfortable with laying low and billing monthly invoices than being proactive. Agencies are generally reactive. Be clear in your needs
• WordPress is not the only solution
• Neither is HTML/CSS
• Optimization and content are usually more valuable and important than looks - that doesn't mean you can settle for an ugly or hard to use website, but plan accordingly
• It is not ridiculous to expect your digital agency to work hard for you
• Find out what you are getting, ask about what will be billed separately, and understand why you are being charged what you are being charged, because the industry is made up of a lot of different types of personalities and some developers have compromised ethics, morals and standards relative to premium digital agencies
• It's a large, complex and important undertaking to build a competent website - partner with the right partner. Your sister's nephew in law may well be brilliant, but when he goes to college, will your business be up a creek?
• You're competing against everyone. From everywhere, and you need to adopt best practices to please the search algorithms. Make sure you understand what is necessary to succeed and get free traffic, and then convert that traffic. It's not the "wild west internet" it once was, where throwing some words and a picture on the website meant you became a millionaire

There are hundreds of other concepts that should be discussed over time with the right partner. Let's chat. You can ask as many questions as you want.

Overwhelmingly the most popular types of websites are WordPress and HTML/CSS/Java driven websites. WordPress is built in PHP and utilizes a dynamic modulation, to allow you to drive the website experience with content like blog posts. Unfortunately, WordPress is often used for businesses that don't need or won't use dynamic content-driven website architecture, and it has some drawbacks if that is not the use case. Nevertheless it is extremely popular because it is popular, and it has a lot of modification capabilities and support in the open source community. 

It is not hard to find "developers" or template driven builders to service the website. Therefore it's important to know what you are getting if you intend to use it properly to market your business. It is not a bad website CMS, and we use it for a large majority of our customers because they understand it, it's widely able to be utilized, and it has a relative easy to moderate learning curve. Wordpress can be a very good place to start for many business website needs.

HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT sites are front end driven and usually provide a more static environment that is less "weight on the page" and faster. it delivers specific content on specific pages and it is easy to configure and maintain. 

For E-Commerce, there are basically three big players right now (and some vocal mid-range players with some popularity):

WooCommerce (built on WordPress)

Shopify (proprietary and built on their infrastructure)

Magento (Comprehensive but harder to maintain and optimize)

The smaller players also include Joomla, Big Commerce, and others. 

Vastly, the technology is changing to be a headless architecture. This means that you structure a website on the front end of the site (what the customer sees) and drive it outside of the native environment of that front-end library or CMS, using things called API's which basically utilize bigger services backed by larger companies to drive services and dynamic environments that change in "near time" to serve the proper content and experience. These API's are maintained by bigger, more well-funded companies (for example Google, Microsoft, Reddit, Facebook, Shopify, Fed-Ex, or big industry specific players). This allows you to serve the right things to the right user at the exact time they want it. It is relatively secure and driven by the user and maintained by a smaller team than what it would take to replicate such an experience with a development and programming team. It is also "future proof" in the sense that as your company or business changes or your user experience needs evolve, you can attach a different, or more complex implementation of an API to drive that need. What you see on the front end is not necessarily proprietarily tied to the backend (the data that provides the experience). This gives companies more freedom. 

It allows for faster, more interesting experiences for consumers. Think Netflix, for example: they serve a customer based on preferences stored in a database that is tied to the login information, which then uses complex services to drive new content suggestions, route to the fastest server for that user, and to deliver the experience that user expects - all driven by automated, algorithmically driven API's that deliver exactly what is expected based on past experiences. This allows Netflix to show more content, in a way that is speedy, doesn't bog down their infrastructure, and still delivers exactly what the customer expects. The load balancing, stream quality and suggestion engines are all driven by these microservices and automated, "triggered" events and code interactions. Parts of this type of architecture is actually SERVERLESS! It's jsut reliant on virtual containers and code interactions. This is all driven in a hybrid environment including the cloud. 

Because of the changes in technology, building an experience "like" Netflix is significantly less expensive than even a few years ago, and large cloud computing providers like AWS and AZURE and Google can help businesses (even small businesses) offer enterprise level experiences to customers. 

From a development perspective, this type of integration is more expensive than an open source solution like WordPress, but can be integrated into the overall needs of the business and their consumer. For instance, one might spin up a server on AWS LightSail that hosts a WordPress environment and use lambda and other stateful or stateless, server-driven, containerized or serverless, data driven solutions to improve the real-time experience. This can support many thousands of users concurrently if needed to, because not only can a website scale up in real time using computing on demand resources, but also can scale out as you grow in user base. While this may all seem like buzzwords and fancy talk, these are real-world solutions that provide streamlined, efficient and comprehensive experiences to consumers on behalf of businesses, through third party service providers. 

Sometimes a business just needs a way to connect with consumers (think WordPress or HTML/CSS/JS); sometimes they need lightweight, dynamic, data driven applications that require things like headless Shopify or Next.Js with React Native; and sometimes they need enterprise solutions that require a mix of code languages, libraries and API's all integrated to deliver big datasets, or experiences to a lot of users efficiently. 

It's a discussion that is far bigger than a few paragraphs. Luckily, with the right agency, you can expect to tell your account representative what you want to accomplish, listen to ideas and architecture that is available, and eventually come to an agreement on what is needed to accomplish the goals you set. We can help you flesh out the options and deliver on expectations. Let's Chat!