Web design / Providence, RI
A tough crowd for typefaces
With RISD on College Hill and Brown next door, a fair number of the people reading your website were trained to judge one, and the rest live surrounded by their work. Bad kerning gets noticed here.
That cuts both ways. A small business doesn’t need to compete with a RISD thesis show. It needs a site with a few good decisions made on purpose: one or two typefaces, real photographs, a layout that leaves things out. Copying whatever effect the studio down the street used last year is the quickest way to look dated by spring. If your mark was drawn in an afternoon and looks it, start with logo design before the site.
Restaurants, and a lot of them
Johnson & Wales has been sending cooks into the city’s kitchens for decades, and it shows on Federal Hill, along Hope and Wickenden streets and out in Pawtucket. For a restaurant, four pages carry nearly all the weight: the menu, hours, reservations and directions with parking. They should load quickly on a phone, and whoever runs the floor should be the one editing them, not a developer two weeks later. We build menus as a Framer collection for exactly that reason, and our restaurant guide goes through the rest.
WaterFire nights bring crowds downtown who decide where to eat while standing by the river. Being found then comes down to dull basics: correct hours on Google and a menu that isn’t a scanned PDF.
The whole state is your service area
Rhode Island is small enough that a Cranston plumber can be in Westerly by lunch. The metro covers the entire state plus Bristol County in Massachusetts, so Fall River, New Bedford and Attleboro are part of the same market, and searches there use Massachusetts town names.
Locals carve the state up their own way. Washington County is “South County” to everyone who lives in it, Newport and the islands run on a summer calendar, and Warwick and Cranston have their own commercial strips. A site that uses those names sounds local; a page titled “Washington County” sounds like it was written in another state.
Newport’s wedding season keeps photographers, florists and caterers busy from late spring into fall, and those vendors mostly win work through portfolios. Our page for creatives and photographers is written with them in mind.
Makers and small shops
The Jewelry District downtown is named for the trade that once filled it, and independent jewelers, metalsmiths and furniture makers still work in studios across the city, many of them selling far beyond Rhode Island. Their sites are shops first. Good product photography, honest descriptions of materials and a checkout that works on a phone matter more than any clever homepage; our guide to ecommerce sites covers the details.
Hiring a studio outside Rhode Island
We’re remote and don’t keep a Providence office. Calls are set for Eastern Time; each design review is a link to pass around the kitchen. Most projects here would combine brand identity with a site built in Framer, which your staff can update once we hand it over.
One question from Providence
Is Newport worth a separate page?
If you do real business there in summer, yes. Newport visitors search differently from Providence locals: often from out of state, and often months ahead for weddings and events. A page written for them, with travel times and seasonal details, will do better than a footnote on your main page.