Web design / Boston, MA
Every September, a new city
On September 1 a good part of Boston changes address at once. Leases turn over, moving trucks jam Allston and Mission Hill, and a new wave of students arrives at Northeastern, BU and the colleges across the river. For a coffee shop, a gym or a dentist, some of last year’s regulars are gone and the new neighbors have never heard of you.
The first thing they do is search. So the site has to work as an introduction every fall: where you are relative to the T stop, what things cost, which insurance you take, how to book. If that’s buried in a PDF, the new arrivals go to whoever made it easy.
Explaining science to the people who fund it
Kendall Square and the Seaport are full of young life-science and robotics companies whose sites have to work for investors and for the scientists they hope to hire. Most of those sites fail in one of two ways. They hide the science behind soft lines about patients and purpose, or they paste in an abstract only a postdoc could parse.
The better version explains the mechanism in two sentences a smart outsider can follow, then lets the experts go deeper. Diagrams help, and so does movement: a short animation of how a molecule binds or a device works often says more than a page of text. We make both 3D design and motion and film for that reason, and our notes on startup sites cover the rest.
A small city inside a big metro
Suffolk County is Boston plus Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop, and that’s all. Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Quincy, Brookline and Medford are their own places, and their residents search by those names and would rather not be lumped in with Boston. A physical therapist in Brookline should lead with Brookline.
The metro stretches north into Essex County, south into Plymouth County, and up into southern New Hampshire, where Rockingham and Strafford counties (Salem, Portsmouth, Dover) send plenty of commuters south.
Patriots’ Day is its own case. The marathon closes roads along the route into Back Bay on that Monday in April, and any business near the course should post its hours and access well ahead of time, on a page it can update itself. If you have customers in both states, spell out which services you offer where and mention any license that differs.
Asked in Boston
Our audience is investors and scientists. Can the site stay plain?
Plain is fine. Vague isn’t. A quiet, text-led site can suit a research company well, as long as it states clearly what you’re building and why it matters. We’d spend more of the budget on the words than on effects.
Should a Somerville business mention Boston at all?
Once or twice, in context. Lead with Somerville and the square you’re closest to (Davis, Union, Assembly), because that’s how customers will look for you.
How we’d work with a Boston team
There’s no Boston office (all our work is done remotely), and we fit calls around lab meetings and clinic hours in Eastern Time. By launch your own people will know how to edit the site in Framer. Most Boston projects would pair web design with technical SEO, because a site that loads slowly loses the people searching on their commute.