Web design / Charleston, WV
Word of mouth still runs the valley
In Charleston a new customer usually turns up with your name already in hand. Somebody’s cousin used you, or a neighbor in Kanawha City said you did right by them on a roof. By the time they look you up, they’ve mostly decided. The website’s job is to confirm that you’re a real, working business: a phone number that rings, hours that are right, photos of actual jobs, and a few sentences that sound like the owner.
That’s a smaller job than most web designers will admit, and it calls for a smaller site. Five good pages beat twenty thin ones. We’d much rather spend the effort on the photos and the words than on pages nobody opens. Small business web design is the right starting point for most owners here.
Hills, hollows and one bar of signal
Drive south on Corridor G toward Boone County, or up the Elk toward Clay, and phone coverage gets patchy fast. A customer in Madison who taps your link from a church parking lot may be on a connection that struggles with anything heavy. The page still has to load.
That rules out a lot of what passes for modern web design. No autoplay video behind the headline, no carousel of six huge photos, no fonts loaded from four different places. Use small images. Put a phone number at the top that’s a real link, and make the text appear before the decorations do. A site built like that works fine in South Charleston on fiber and still works at the head of a hollow.
Capitol, hospitals and the plants downriver
Charleston is the state capital, and the gold dome on the Kanawha brings a professional economy with it: agencies, the lawyers and lobbyists who deal with them, the accountants and engineering firms that bid on state work. Add the CAMC hospitals and the chemical plants downriver in South Charleston and Institute, and there’s a steady trade in services that sell to careful institutional buyers.
Those buyers want plain facts. Who you are, what credentials you hold, which counties you cover, how to reach a person. Medical practices have the same need with an added layer for patients, which our guide to medical and dental practices covers. And the trades, the roofers and remodelers working St. Albans, Dunbar and Nitro, need a gallery of real work more than anything else; there’s more in our notes for contractors.
A lot of established Charleston businesses also have a logo that was drawn up quickly years ago and never revisited. If the truck, the sign and the website all show slightly different versions of it, a tidy logo design project is often the cheapest way to look more established without changing anything else.
How a project runs
There’s no Charleston storefront to drop by, since we do all the work remotely. It starts with a call or a few emails (we keep Eastern Time), then a written plan for you to sign off on. Each design comes through as a link light enough for the truck between jobs. Before handover, you’ll learn to change hours, photos and text yourself, so you’re not paying someone every time a holiday comes around.
One question we’d expect
Do we need a website if everyone already finds us on Facebook?
Probably, yes. A Facebook page is fine for news and photos, but it’s harder to find from a Google search, it shows other businesses’ ads around yours, and you don’t control it. A small site with your services, your service area and a contact form gives people somewhere to land, and you can keep posting on Facebook and link back to it.