Web design / Columbus, OH
Customers who’ve seen the test version
Columbus has a long reputation as a test market, because the region’s mix of ages, incomes and backgrounds tracks the country unusually closely. A chain with a new menu item or a retailer with a new store format will often try it here before anywhere else. Add Abercrombie & Fitch’s headquarters in New Albany and the large number of fashion and retail designers who live in central Ohio, and you get customers with a sharp eye for branding, even if they’d never put it that way.
That changes what a small business is up against. A boutique in the Short North or a coffee roaster in Clintonville gets compared with the shop down the street, and also, at a glance, with national brands that spent heavily on photography and type and then tested both. You can’t outspend them. You can be clearer and more specific, though, and you can have a logo and website that look like they were designed together instead of collected over a decade.
Campus is a market of its own
Ohio State puts tens of thousands of students within a short walk of High Street, and each fall a new class arrives knowing nothing about local businesses. They search on phones, often on mobile data, and they won’t wait for a slow page. Gyms, salons, apartment managers and late-night food along that stretch need a site that loads fast, shows prices without a phone call and books in a few taps. Our fitness and wellness guide covers the booking side in detail.
Home football Saturdays are the other half of it. When the stadium fills, so does every street around campus, and a business with a game-day offer needs to post it the night before, without calling a developer.
Franklin County is only the start
The metro keeps spreading. Dublin and Hilliard sit to the northwest, Westerville and the city of Delaware to the north, New Albany to the east, Grove City and Canal Winchester to the south. Each has its own chamber, its own schools and its own search habits, so a Dublin lawn care company that only says “Columbus” loses to the one that names Dublin and Powell outright.
Farther out, the counties change character. Licking County has Newark and Granville; Fairfield County has Lancaster and Pickerington. Down in Hocking County, the Hocking Hills pull visitors from all over the state, and cabin rentals and outfitters there depend on them. A cabin business is selling a weekend, not a service. Its site should be built around photos, availability and directions people can save before they drive out on back roads. Small business web design for owners like these is mostly about getting a few things exactly right.
Notes on working together
All of our work is remote, and Columbus shares the Eastern Time clock, so calls are easy to place. For this city’s startups the part worth stressing is the handover: young companies rewrite their homepage most months, and once the site is live in Framer they can do it without asking anyone. Our startup guide goes into early-stage sites.
Asked in Columbus
Most of our customers are students. What should the site do in summer?
Admit that things are quieter. Post summer hours, point the homepage at whatever still sells to the people who stay (grad students, staff, neighbors), and have a refresh ready before move-in week in August.