Web design / Tucson, AZ
Menus are the most-read page in town
In 2015 Tucson became the first US city UNESCO named a City of Gastronomy, and people here take that seriously. They argue about Sonoran hot dogs and carne seca, and they notice when a kitchen cooks with tepary beans or mesquite flour. For a restaurant website, all that interest lands on the least loved page: the menu.
A PDF of last spring’s menu, opened on a phone at a red light on Speedway, is where restaurant sites lose people. We’d put the menu on the page as real text with current prices, so it loads quickly and search engines can read it. Kitchens here change dishes with the seasons; editing the menu should take your manager two minutes. Hours, reservations and what to do about a patio nobody wants to sit on in August are all in our restaurant guide.
Three weeks every winter
Each year, around the end of January and into February, the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show and the dozens of smaller shows around it fill the city with dealers, collectors and buyers from all over the world. For a few weeks the town has a second population, and almost none of them know where anything is.
The dealers aren’t the only ones who should care. Caterers, print shops, short-term rentals, car services and restaurants near the show venues all get searched by people with money and no local knowledge. A page written for them helps: where you are relative to the convention center, whether you take walk-ins or late orders during show weeks, and a number that gets answered after hours. Put it up in December and take it down in March.
The university, the base and the people who move here
The University of Arizona sets a lot of the city’s calendar, with move-in in August, game weekends in the fall and a quiet stretch each summer when students scatter. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base brings military families who arrive knowing nobody and need a pediatrician, a mechanic and a barber in their first month. Tucson’s defense and optics employers bring engineers on transfer from other states.
All of these newcomers compare businesses they’ve never heard of, usually late at night and on a phone. They want proof you’re real. That means photos of your actual storefront, staff names and a clear note on which part of town you’re in, because “Tucson” covers a lot of desert.
Pima County, town by town
Everything in the metro sits inside Pima County, but its towns don’t behave alike. Oro Valley and Marana to the north, Sahuarita and Green Valley to the south, Vail out to the southeast: each has its own mix of retirees, young families and commuters, and each searches by its own name. The Catalina Foothills have their own expectations again. If you’re a service company covering several of them, say so with a sentence per town and drive times that match reality, rather than a radius drawn on a map.
Two languages, done properly
A large share of Tucson does business in Spanish as well as English, and shoppers come up from Sonora through Nogales. If your customers include them, a real Spanish version of each page beats an auto-translate button that mangles your service names. Framer handles a second language well, and you can edit both versions yourself after launch.
Working with us from Tucson
Everything happens remotely, with calls set for Arizona time, which conveniently stays put when the rest of the country changes its clocks. Most projects start from web design; a business that’s outgrown a logo made years ago often adds brand identity at the same time. You approve the plan in writing before any design starts.
Tucson questions
Can you build the Spanish pages, or do we need a translator?
You’ll want a fluent person on your side to approve the wording, because tone matters and nobody knows your customers better. We design and build both versions so they match, and we can work from your translations or help you brief a translator.
Is it worth making a gem show page if we only see show traffic for a few weeks?
If those weeks matter to your revenue, yes. It’s one page, it can go live and come down on dates you choose, and it gives visitors a reason to pick you over the place next door.