Web design / Tampa, FL
The bridge question
Every business around Tampa Bay eventually decides how far it’s willing to drive. For a plumber based in Brandon, St. Petersburg is effectively another city, and the Howard Frankland at five o’clock settles the argument. For a law firm in Westshore, Pinellas is a short hop on a good day and well worth it.
Your website should give the same answer your dispatcher gives. If you only work in Hillsborough, say so, and spare people in Clearwater a form you’ll have to decline. If you cover both sides, name the towns and show that you’ve actually been there: photos from their side of the water, a job list that includes Dunedin or Largo, a phone number nobody has to wonder about.
People on the Pinellas side are loyal to it. St. Pete has spent years building its own downtown and its own identity, and residents notice when a site treats them as a Tampa suburb. Write to them directly.
North of the city, where the new subdivisions are
Pasco County keeps filling in around Wesley Chapel and Land O’ Lakes, and the Suncoast Parkway keeps pulling families up toward Spring Hill in Hernando County. Someone who just closed on a house out there is searching for everything in the same week: a dentist, a pest control company, a gym, somebody to fix the irrigation system that came with the yard. They type the town’s name, or “near me”. They almost never type “Tampa”.
That’s an opening for any contractor or practice willing to write a real page for each area it covers. “Serving the greater Tampa Bay area” in the footer won’t get you found in Wesley Chapel. A page about the work you do there, with photos from there, has a chance. Our contractors guide and our page on SEO go further into how those pages get built and which towns deserve one.
Hurricane season
The 2024 season made this argument for us. Helene’s surge, and then Milton about two weeks later, shut businesses across the region for days, and plenty of them had no way to tell customers anything except a Facebook post. After a storm, people check Google and your website to see if you’re open, often on a phone with one bar of signal and a dying battery.
So we build Tampa sites with a notice bar anyone on your staff can switch on from a phone, and a homepage light enough to load on a weak connection. Hours, closures and reopening dates go in as text, never as an image someone has to export first. It’s dull work. You’ll be glad of it in October.
The rest of the calendar
Gasparilla takes over Bayshore Boulevard every January, and spring training fills restaurants and hotels around Clearwater and Dunedin in February and March. If those weeks drive your year, your site needs a way to put event hours and specials at the top without redesigning anything. That’s mostly a question of how the pages are set up in Framer, which is part of every web design project we take on. An older site that can’t do it is usually a case for a website redesign rather than another patch.
Nobody has to cross the Howard Frankland to meet us, because there’s no office to drive to: we work remotely, on Eastern Time. Design rounds come to you as links, and the handover teaches your team to make changes themselves.
Asked around the bay
Can someone other than the owner post a storm closure?
Yes, and they should. We set up editor access for whoever’s on duty, so a manager can flip the notice on from the parking lot without logging in as you.
Will a Wesley Chapel page compete with our main Tampa page?
Not if each one says something different. A page about your work in Pasco, with its own photos and its own details, helps people there find you without pulling anything away from the Tampa page.