Web design / San Francisco, CA
How far will someone in the Bay Area travel for a haircut? Not across a bridge, usually. People will cross the bay for a concert, a ballgame or a restaurant they’ve read about for months, but for the everyday things (a dentist, a tailor, a yoga class, a plumber) they stay on their own side of the water.
That’s why a San Francisco site that only says “San Francisco” leaves money on the table if the business also serves Oakland and Berkeley, Walnut Creek, San Mateo or Mill Valley. And it’s why a business in the Outer Sunset shouldn’t sound like it’s in SoMa. The city itself is small, about seven miles on a side, but people here think in neighborhoods, and they notice when a site gets theirs wrong.
Five counties, five ways of searching
The metro we cover runs across San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin counties. Each behaves a little differently. East Bay customers search for Oakland, Berkeley or Fremont by name. On the Peninsula, people are as likely to type Redwood City or Burlingame as anything with “Bay Area” in it. Marin searches for Marin.
If you genuinely serve several of these, give each one a page that says something true about working there, such as which days you’re in which towns, or the parking situation at your second location. A footer that says “Serving the greater Bay Area” helps nobody, including Google.
Restaurants: put the menu on the page
San Francisco diners check before they go. They look at the menu, the hours and whether there’s a table on Saturday, often while standing on the sidewalk outside somewhere else. The most common way restaurants fail them is the PDF menu: slow to open, impossible to read on a phone, invisible to search engines, and usually out of date by a season.
A menu should be a real web page that your staff can change when the halibut runs out. We build restaurant sites in Framer so that’s a five-minute job for whoever runs the front of house, and reservations, private dining pages and the delivery-app question are all in our restaurant guide.
Nonprofits and the donate button
San Francisco is home to a lot of nonprofits, many of them small, and their websites tend to share a problem. They were built by a volunteer years ago, they explain the mission in a paragraph nobody finishes, and the donate button sends people to a payment page that looks like a different organization.
The fix is usually a website redesign rather than a rebuild from nothing: keep the content that works, rewrite the rest so a first-time visitor understands what you do in a sentence, and make giving feel like part of the same site. Sometimes the old logo needs attention too, which is where brand identity comes in. Our nonprofit guide covers grant reporting pages, events and volunteer sign-ups.
One question we’d expect from a San Francisco owner
Our rent is high and there’s no front desk. Can the website take some of that load?
It can take a lot of it. A site that answers the common questions on the page, takes bookings directly and sends each kind of inquiry to the right person’s inbox can save hours a week. The trick is resisting the urge to add a chatbot before the basic answers are written down.
Practical details
We work remotely, with calls on Pacific Time and reviews sent as shared links, which beats crossing town for a meeting. Before design starts there’s a written plan you approve, so nobody is surprised halfway through.