Web design / Salt Lake City, UT
Write the address the way locals say it
Salt Lake’s street grid starts at the southeast corner of Temple Square, and nearly every address in the valley is really a coordinate. 900 South and 900 East is nine blocks south and nine east of that corner, which is why people call the neighborhood there Ninth and Ninth. Locals say “21st South” for 2100 South and know where they’re going. Visitors and new arrivals don’t, at least not at first.
So on a Salt Lake site the address deserves more care than it usually gets. Write it out in full, the way the city writes it, then add the nearest cross street and the closest TRAX station if there is one. Use exactly the same wording on your contact page, in the footer and on your Google profile, because mismatched versions of one address make map listings less sure where you are. That’s a five-minute fix, and it’s surprising how many local sites still get it wrong.
Salt Lake County is the real market
Salt Lake City itself is only part of the county around it. A great many customers live in West Valley City, West Jordan, Sandy, South Jordan, Draper, Herriman, Murray and Millcreek, and they type those names when they search. Over the Oquirrh Mountains, Tooele and Grantsville make up the rest of the metro, a separate valley with its own commute and its own idea of what counts as local.
One homepage can’t speak to all of that. Our advice is to pick the handful of towns that bring you the most work and give each a page with something real on it: the neighborhoods you serve, the drive time from your shop, a photo from a job there. It’s slow work, and it’s the part of local SEO a list of town names in the footer will never replace.
Customers who work in software
Utah’s tech corridor, the one people call Silicon Slopes, runs from Draper south into Lehi and on through Utah County. Plenty of people who live in Salt Lake County commute to it, and they bring their day-job habits home with them. They notice a slow page, a form that breaks, that stock photo of two people shaking hands. A dental practice in Draper or a gym in South Jordan is being judged by people who review software for a living.
That doesn’t mean your site needs animation or a dark theme. It means it needs to work perfectly on a phone, say what you do in a sentence, and let someone book without making a phone call. If you’re selling to those companies directly, our startups guide explains how they tend to buy.
Canyon season
Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons hold Alta, Snowbird, Brighton and Solitude, all a short drive from downtown. The ski shops, rental places and restaurants near the canyon mouths in Cottonwood Heights and Sandy live on winter weekends, then switch over to hikers and mountain bikers when the snow melts. Their websites should switch with them, and nobody should have to hire a designer to swap a winter rental page for a summer one.
So we build in Framer and set up the seasonal pieces for you to change yourself, usually in a few minutes, from any laptop. For a shop like that, small business web design covers most of it. A newer company still working out what it looks like may want brand identity first.
Remote, and on Mountain Time
Nobody from the studio sits in a Utah office; we work remotely and hold calls on Mountain Time. Before any design, you sign off on a short written plan, which tends to go down well with people who read specs at work all day.
A Salt Lake question
Should my address use the grid numbers or a street name?
Use whatever is on your official address, written in full, and add the grid version in plain words if your street has a name. “Southeast corner of 1300 East and 2100 South” tells a local exactly where you are, even if the mail goes to a named street.