Web design / Atlanta, GA
ITP or OTP?
Ask people in Atlanta what part of town they’re in, and a fair number will answer with an acronym. Inside the Perimeter means inside I-285: Midtown, Old Fourth Ward, Inman Park, Virginia-Highland, Decatur. Outside it is everywhere else, from Marietta and Kennesaw in Cobb to Duluth and Lawrenceville in Gwinnett and Alpharetta up in north Fulton. The labels come with assumptions about traffic, budgets and taste, and some of them are even accurate.
For a business, the useful question is which side your customers are on. A boutique on the BeltLine and a landscaping company in Cherokee County are both “in Atlanta,” but they sell to different people who search in different ways. The site should know which ones it’s talking to and say so early.
Distance is measured in minutes
Atlantans don’t think in miles. A dentist in Sandy Springs is close to Roswell and nowhere near Decatur at rush hour, even though the map says otherwise. When customers decide if you’re near them, they’re estimating the drive, so a service area should be described the way they’d describe it: neighborhoods and towns you actually reach, and a sense of how far you’ll go.
The metro covers 29 counties, so “serving metro Atlanta” means almost nothing. A plumber in Henry County who works McDonough, Stockbridge and the south side of the city should say exactly that. A practice with offices in Cumming and Woodstock needs one page per office. Good local SEO here starts with that honesty, not with stuffing town names into a footer.
Peachtree, and other address problems
The city has so many streets called Peachtree that visitors make a sport of getting lost on them. If your address includes one, help people out: give the cross street, a landmark, which side of the road the entrance is on and where to park. It’s a small thing, and it saves calls from people circling the block. The same goes for anywhere inside a mixed-use development, where the building numbers make sense to nobody.
A city full of people who make images
Film and television production has been a big part of Atlanta’s economy for years, and the music business here goes back much further. That has built a deep bench of photographers, editors, stylists, set builders, colorists and small production companies. Their websites are portfolios, and too many of them are slow ones. A reel that takes ten seconds to start, or a gallery that loads full-size camera files, loses a producer who’s comparing six vendors in an afternoon.
We build those sites in Framer, which handles video and large images well and lets you swap in new work yourselves after each job; our page on Framer web design explains why we use it. For studios that want something moving on the homepage, our motion and film work can cut a short loop from your existing footage. The photographers and creatives guide covers the rest.
Reviewing from set
We’re remote, so there’s no Atlanta office, and calls keep Eastern Time. A producer can check a design round from set during a lighting change, and the launch ends with your team adding a new project to the site themselves while we watch.
Asked inside the Perimeter
Our office is in Buckhead but we work all over the metro. How do we say that without listing 29 counties?
Name the areas where most of your work comes from, in a sentence, and say you’ll travel further for the right job. Then give separate pages only to places where you have real projects or an actual office. A long list of counties reads as filler to customers and to Google alike.