Web design / Houston, TX
Houston never adopted zoning, and you can see it from any freeway: a welding shop beside a row of townhouses, a strip center holding a taqueria, a tax preparer and a dental office. Houstonians are used to that mix. For a website, that means an address says less than it would elsewhere, because people choose by drive time and by which side of which loop you’re on.
Inside the Loop, outside the Beltway
Locals describe the city in rings. Inside the Loop means inside 610; Beltway 8 is the next ring out; the Grand Parkway is the far one, running past land that was pasture not long ago. A homeowner in Katy and one in Pearland might as well live in different cities as far as service businesses go, and a family in The Woodlands rarely drives into Harris County for a dentist.
So we write service areas the way people talk about them. If you cover Sugar Land and Missouri City in Fort Bend County, those names go on a page written for that side of town. If you work the Bay Area (Clear Lake, League City, down toward Galveston), that’s a different page again, because the people there think of it as a different place. A list of thirty suburbs pasted into a footer does nothing. Four honest pages do more, and our SEO work starts with deciding which four.
Selling to engineers
A big share of Houston’s economy still runs through energy, and a lot of the city’s businesses sell into it: fabricators and inspection firms along the Ship Channel, consultancies in the Energy Corridor out on I-10, valve and pump distributors, environmental and safety contractors. Their buyers are engineers and procurement staff, and hero videos don’t move them.
What moves them is boring and specific. What do you make, to which standards, with which certifications, and how quickly do you answer a request for quote? Data sheets should be real pages that search engines can read, with a PDF on offer for anyone who wants to print, not the other way round. Product catalogs need clean structure and fast pages, and that’s the work technical SEO does on an industrial site. A plain, well-organized catalog will outsell a pretty one that hides its part numbers.
The Medical Center and the practices around it
The Texas Medical Center is practically its own city of hospitals south of downtown, and the metro around it is full of specialist clinics, physical therapists and private practices. Patients compare them on a phone in the parking lot. A practice site has to show which insurance it takes, where to park and how to book, all before it says a word about its philosophy of care. Our guide to medical and dental sites goes through the rest.
When the weather turns
Anyone who has run a business here through hurricane season has a story about the week they couldn’t open. When the next storm comes, the website should say what’s open in one line across the top of every page, and posting it should take you thirty seconds. We build in Framer and hand the site over, so you or anyone on staff can switch on a closure notice from a phone at 6 a.m.
There’s no Houston office to visit, because we work remotely. Calls keep Central Time hours, and design reviews go out as shared links, which helps in a city where the colleague who needs to see them might be forty minutes away on the Katy Freeway.
Houston questions
Should our product specs live on the site or in PDFs?
Both, but the page comes first. Engineers search for part numbers and ratings, and a PDF is hard for search engines to parse and harder still to read on a phone in a plant. Put the key numbers on a proper page and attach the PDF underneath.
Can we post storm closures ourselves?
Yes. We set up a site-wide notice you can turn on and edit without us, and we’ll show your team how during the launch walkthrough.