Web design / Burlington, VT
No billboards, so the website does the work
Vermont banned billboards in 1968 and the last of them came down a few years later. Drive Route 7 or I-89 and nothing tells you which diner to stop at. So reputation does the advertising, and it travels the way it always has in a small place: friends, coworkers, the person behind you in line at the co-op.
What happens next is a search. Someone hears about your bakery or your physical therapy practice, looks you up, and decides in a few seconds whether the recommendation holds. The site doesn’t have to persuade them from scratch. It has to look like the business they were told about, with photos of the actual place, hours that are right and an obvious way to book or call.
Church Street, the lake and the visitors
Church Street Marketplace and the waterfront carry much of Burlington’s foot traffic, and plenty of it isn’t local. Summer brings people up for Lake Champlain, fall brings leaf-peepers, and winter brings skiers passing through on the way to the mountains. Montreal is close enough that Québécois visitors have been part of downtown business for decades, even in years when fewer of them cross the border.
That makes a French version worth a serious look for a downtown shop or restaurant. Not a translation plug-in: real pages, checked by a fluent speaker, so a visitor searching in French finds you. Restaurants will find the rest in our restaurant guide, starting with menus written as text instead of photos of paper.
The college calendar
UVM and Champlain College set the rhythm of the year for many Burlington businesses. There’s move-in in late August, a quiet stretch once the students leave, and graduation weekend in May, when a dinner reservation gets hard to come by. If your business follows that calendar, the homepage should follow it too. We build in Framer partly for that reason: your staff can post the new semester hours themselves.
The rest of the metro
Chittenden County holds most of it: South Burlington, Winooski, Essex, Colchester, Williston and Shelburne. Franklin County runs north toward the Canadian border with St. Albans at its center, and Grand Isle County is the string of islands out in the lake. People there search by town, and a Williston painter does better with a page about Williston than with a vague claim to serve “the greater Burlington area.”
Vermont also has a lot of mission-driven organizations: land trusts, food co-ops, social-service groups, companies with their values written into their charters. Their sites have to explain the mission without reading like a grant report, and our nonprofit guide covers that balance.
There’s no Burlington office. We work by video call in Eastern Time and send each stage as a shared link to look over whenever the shop is quiet.
Burlington questions
Should we add French?
If you’re downtown or on the waterfront and serve visitors, it’s worth considering. Start with the pages a visitor needs most (hours, menu or products, location), see whether French searchers find them, and expand from there.
Is SEO worth paying for in a market this small?
The basics are. Correct business details, one page per town you serve and fast load times go further here than in a big city, because there are fewer competitors for each search. Our SEO page explains what we’d do and what we’d skip.