Web design / Miami, FL
The buyer might be in Bogotá
A freight forwarder in Doral can spend the morning on WhatsApp with a customer in Colombia and the afternoon quoting a warehouse job in Medley. Its website has to work for both of them. Most don’t. They read like a brochure run through a browser plug-in, and the contact form asks for a ZIP code that a buyer in Lima doesn’t have.
That gap is about as Miami as a problem gets. So much of the region’s trade faces south, through the cargo terminals at the airport and the port downtown, that a company with ten employees can have customers in six countries. Before the site says anything clever, it has to tell a stranger in another country who you are and how to get hold of you, in their language, on whatever phone they’re holding.
Spanish written by a person
Most Miami owners know a translation widget is a bad idea. They’ve seen what one does to a menu. The better approach treats Spanish as its own version of the site, with its own page addresses, its own headlines and its own search terms. People in Hialeah don’t search the way people in Madrid do, and a Venezuelan customer and a Cuban-American one won’t always reach for the same word.
We set the structure up in Framer so every page has an English and a Spanish version and search engines know which is which. The words themselves should come from, or at least be read by, someone who talks to your customers every day. We’d rather leave a page in English than publish Spanish nobody on your team has checked. The same rule holds if you serve Haitian Creole speakers in Little Haiti or North Miami. That discipline is most of what separates a real website redesign here from a fresh coat of paint.
Three counties that don’t call themselves Miami
The metro runs up the coast through Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, and each has its own habits. Someone in Coral Gables searches for Coral Gables. Someone in Fort Lauderdale would be faintly annoyed to be filed under Miami, and nobody in Boca Raton has ever described themselves as living there.
For a service business, the site should name the places you actually go. A pool company working Pembroke Pines and Weston needs pages that say so, written about those neighborhoods rather than cloned from the Miami page with the town swapped. Search engines have gotten good at spotting the cloned version, and so have customers. Our page on SEO explains how we decide which towns earn a page and which only need a line.
December, and the other eleven months
Art Basel Miami Beach arrives in early December with collectors, galleries and a week of satellite fairs and parties. For a gallery, a hotel bar or a studio in Wynwood, that week can outweigh any other, and the site has to be ready a month ahead, not the night before. The rest of the year belongs to residents, though, and a restaurant site that only talks to December visitors feels odd to the regulars in July. Our restaurant guide gets into menus, reservations and changing hours.
Real estate is the other Miami constant. A broker selling Brickell condos to buyers abroad faces the freight forwarder’s language problem with more money riding on it; the real estate guide covers listings and lead forms.
How the work happens
There’s no Miami office; we’re remote and keep Eastern Time, which matches Bogotá’s clock through the winter months. Each design review comes as a link to check between appointments, and the launch session covers editing both languages without calling us.
Two questions from South Florida
Should the Spanish site live on its own domain?
Usually not. One domain with a Spanish section keeps your search history in one place and gives your team one site to maintain. A separate domain makes sense mainly when the Spanish-speaking side of the business has different staff and different prices, which happens, but less often than owners assume.
Is it worth launching before Art Basel?
Only if that week is genuinely your biggest. If it is, start talking in late summer, because a bilingual site means twice the copy to write and approve, and approvals are what slow projects down.