Web design / Seattle, WA
Shoot for November, not August
A lot of Seattle business sites look as if they were photographed on the single best afternoon of the summer: blue water, long shadows, a mountain in the background. Then a customer visits in late November, when the sky is low and the sun is down before five, and the café or the gym looks nothing like its pictures. The mismatch is small, but it’s the first thing they notice.
We’d rather design for the city as it is most of the year. Photograph interiors with warm light, shoot the storefront on an overcast day so it reads as honest, and pick colors that hold up next to gray rather than washing out. A gym or yoga studio in particular sells the feeling of a warm room on a wet evening; our fitness and wellness guide goes into that. None of this needs a big budget. It needs someone deciding on purpose.
Water draws the map
King, Pierce and Snohomish counties are divided less by county lines than by water and bridges. Lake Washington splits Seattle from Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland, and the 520 and I-90 bridges decide whether a plumber in Ballard will take a job in Issaquah on a Thursday afternoon. Tacoma has its own downtown, its own port and its own loyalties. Everett, up north, is built around Boeing’s widebody plant and the naval station, and doesn’t think of itself as a Seattle suburb.
So a service-area page that says “Greater Seattle” helps nobody. Say which side of the lake you work, which bridges you’ll cross, and which towns you won’t go to, then give each of the places that bring you real business its own page. That’s the core of the SEO work we’d do for a local company here.
Neighborhoods are part of the brand
Inside the city, people belong to neighborhoods. Ballard, Fremont, Capitol Hill, Columbia City and West Seattle each have their own character, and a shop’s neighborhood is a big part of who it is. A bakery on Capitol Hill and a hardware store in Ballard shouldn’t share a template, and their sites shouldn’t read as if they could be anywhere.
That’s where brand identity earns its fee: type, color and a voice that sound like the street you’re on. It doesn’t mean putting the Space Needle in your logo.
Ship Canal yards and Kent Valley warehouses
Seattle has an industrial side that tourists rarely see. Marine suppliers and repair yards cluster around Fishermen’s Terminal and the Ship Canal, warehouses and distributors fill the Kent Valley, and aerospace subcontractors work for Boeing’s plants in Everett and Renton. Their buyers are engineers and purchasing managers who will read a capabilities page closely and judge you on what’s missing.
For those firms, a solid web design means accurate service pages, certifications easy to find, photos of the actual shop floor, and a quote request that asks for drawings. It’s less glamorous than a consumer site and more useful.
Remote, on Pacific Time
No Seattle office here: we’re remote, with calls on Pacific Time. Each design round comes as a shared link you could review on the Bainbridge ferry, and once the site goes live, your team learns to edit it in Framer.
Seattle questions
Should a Tacoma business mention Seattle at all?
Only where it’s true. If you take jobs in Seattle, a page about that work is fair. But lead with Tacoma and the South Sound towns you serve, because people there search for them, and a Tacoma company pretending to be a Seattle one convinces nobody on either end.
We can’t afford a photographer yet. What should we shoot ourselves?
Your space in daylight from a window, your team at work, and close-ups of what you make or fix. Skip filters. A phone camera on a gray day, held level, gets you most of the way there.