New Hampshire website development services

First - set realistic expectations.

Realistic does not mean bad, uninspiring or less than great. Having realistic expectations when it comes to your website simply means being prepared for all that is required.

This means that you're aware it will take some time to build and develop your website properly, the design might not turn out exactly like you hoped, and the developer might interpret things differently than you. These are all common things when you're working on a project as part of a team. If we could do everything ourselves than we could have everything exactly like we want and when we want, but that's not an efficient way for any of us to operate.

Believe it or not, you'll also need to play an important role in the development of your website - even if you're not the developer. The developer will need you to provide content such as page information (which pages to include, the text and images included), how exactly certain functionalities should work in order to be most effective for your business (i.e. which email addresses should we send contact form submissions to?), if you have any high quality images you can provide, and your reviewal and feedback of the website after certain checkpoints have been reached.

But it's not just during the development phase of the website when you'll need to have proper expectations, there's also having an understanding of how internet marketing works - search engines, indexing and promotions - and what you can expect to happen when your website is launched.

Once you flip the switch and your website is officially "live", you would expect your investment to start paying dividends immediately. But, the truth is, that when you launch your website, nothing happens.

There aren't hundreds or thousands of website visitors waiting to knock down your door. In fact, no one is alerted. Nothing magical actually happens. If you did have an existing website, then people who had visited that site will now be visiting your new site, so they will know that there's been a change.

But launching a website is only the first step toward having an actual, effective website that is a vital part of your business. What do the other steps look like?

• Submission to search engines: yes, you can actually tell search engines like Google and Bing that your website exists, and encourage them to index the pages on your website more quickly. Once they're indexed, they could start appearing in search engine result pages.
• Content creation: add quality content to your website in the form of blog posts, case studies, testimonials, videos - anything and everything that is relevant to your product or service. Search engine's like to rank websites highly that have a lot of high quality, original content. And people more and more like to perform their own research before making purchasing decisions. So, make sure it's your content that they're reading.
• Technical SEO: search engine optimization is the process of improving the technical or coding aspects of your website to improve how well it can be crawled and indexed by search engines. Optimizing your site for search engines will help your ranking in the long run.
• Digital advertising: pay to add advertisements on platforms like Google search to get traffic to your website as soon as possible. Send users to your most important pages - the ones that turn visitors into paying customers.
• Social media: if it makes sense for your business, form a sort of public community or group on social media. Meet potential customers where they are and then sprinkle in your business's products or services when possible to try to convert these prospects into customers.

These are all important building blocks to a solid and effective website promotion and growth plan. However, as you can tell, this requires an investment of time and money. Content will take time to create. Search engine optimization and search rankings will take time to propagate. Digital advertising will require a financial investment. And social media will require time to build your community.

This is where the realistic expectations come into play.

You now have an understanding of what to do with your website after launch, and a realization that growing your website will take some time, effort and maybe even money. But now, by doing these things, you can have a realistic expectation that your website will, in fact, grow.

Second - focus on what matters.

Think about the ideal website for a minute - one that consistently produces new paying customers for its business. What do you think are the highlights of that website - its best features?

Does it have a killer layout that makes it easy to scan the page?

Perhaps it has great call-to-action copy that makes it impossible to not click the sign up button.

Has it mastered it's page content that consistently brings new visitors to its pages, or perhaps the styling is so sleak and modern that it screams a quality company - one worth doing business with?

All of those would be great features of a website - the layout, short copy, page content and styling. But, based on your experience, what do you think the majority of the development time would have been spent on?

Based on our experience of developing dozens and dozens of websites, we would say that at least 95% of the development time (new development and site updates) is spent on the formatting. The majority of the feedback we receive for tweaks and site updates are things like:

• "Can you change the color of that button to blue?"
• "Can we make the padding between sections slightly smaller?"
• "The image on that page isn't centered properly."

These are all fine suggestions, and there's more of this to come, but if this is the majority of requests and changes, then it's imbalanced towards items of the website that have relatively little significance to the performance of the website in terms of generating new revenue for the business.

So, what does an appropriate balance look like? What aspects of a website should receive the most focus?

• Content: creating new content and new pages with content first and updating existing content second. Content has a lot to do with the success of a website. Quality content can bring in lots of high quality traffic to your website. It can set you apart as a leader or expert in your field. It can answer a lot of questions for your potential and existing customers. Content should receive a lot of the focus that you give your website.
• Layout: the layout and the overall structure of the site - the way the pages are organized, the navigation, how the content is displayed on the pages. That should all be given a lot of thought so that it makes sense for the users and how they experience your content. It should also be organized to help funnel users through a sales process that ultimately leads to the user becoming a paying customer. You can see how this might require a lot of ongoing attention and focus.
• Design: design is still important and should still receive attention and care. The problem is that it currently uses about 95% of the website developer's and client's focus in terms of the website. Design is important because a bad design can, in fact, be a major turnoff for a user. It can either increase or decrease a person's perception of your business which can, undoubtedly, affect their likelihood of being a customer. But it's not more important than a site's content or layout.

To put the above in percentages - how much time you should spend on each category- we'd say that once a website has been launched, roughly 80% of a website manager's time should be spent on content, 15% spent on layout and 5% on design. Those aren't perfect numbers and they could certainly change depending on the business, but it might be close.

Third - indentify a strategy that makes sense for you.

If there was only one right and successful way to grow your company's website, then everyone would do it except for those lacking the required resources. Fortunately, there are many ways that you can personalize and customize your own growth. This allows you to leverage the resources that you do have.

It also allows you select a marketing plan that works for you.

There are 2 primary resources worth considering when selecting a promotional plan for your website - time and money.

You might not feel like you have much of either, but you'll need to choose which one you're willing to part with - at least to an extent - if you want to grow your website.

If you're willing and able to invest money into your website, then you could consider things like:

• Paid digital ads like Google Ads and social media ads
• Paying a developer to perform technical search engine optimization
• Paying a developer and digital marketer to plan and build sales funnels on your website for your customers
• Even paying a content creator to create high quality content for your site's blog

If you're able to invest time into your website, then some marketing options you could consider are:

• Creating new content for your website
• Research, plan and modify pages and content to work as sales funnels for your customers
• Build an online community or presence on social media

Or maybe you're able to invest both a little time and a little money. The point is that you have options depending on the resources that are available to you.

Fourth - be consistent.

So, now you have realistic expectations for the work that will be required to build your successful website, what activities you need to perform to get there, and a strategy that you can implement based on your resources.

Now you need to think about the day-to-day. Maybe, in planning, you've identified that you can set some of your financial budget aside to be used for the website in paid Google advertising. Can you commit to having a consistent amount of money to put toward ad spend every month?

When we make a new commitment to growing our website, it's like we're trying to develop a new habit. A good habit that we're confident will be worth the work, money and time we're investing.

But habits are difficult to form without consistency. So, if we're deciding to pay for digital ads every month, if we don't set a fixed, monetary value that we can commit to each and every month, then it's more likely that we'll eventually change course and give up.

Identify what you can commit to spending each and every month for a minimum of at least 6 months. After 6 months, you can reasses and either increase or decrease that ad budget depending on your situation.

Or maybe you've decided that you're able to invest time into your website, and you're thinking that content in the form of a blog is the path you'd like to take.

You may be inspired and decide to dive in head first in the beginning - turning out quality post after quality post. But, at some point, that motivation will likely wane. What are you going to do when you're not excited to produce a new blog post?

It's important to set a simple goal for yourself that you know can be achieved every week with at least a little bit of effort. Maybe that's one 1,000-word blog post per week. Or maybe that's one 1,000-word blog post every month.

It's admirable to have high expectations, but you're looking to make permanent, radical changes in how you approach your website. The turtle (slow and steady) usually beats the hare in those situations.

Focus on consistency first, even if it's less than you think you might be able to handle. You can always decide to commit to increasing your output later, once better habits are formed.

Fifth - review and adapt.

Now that you're website growth program is operating at full capacity, you must be feeling pretty encouraged. And you should - you've established consistency with a plan that you know will produce lasting business results in the long run.

And it will, but is there a chance that maybe your plan isn't perfect? We'd say that that's a statistical guarantee. After all, practice makes perfect, right?

Your current process could prove to work in the long run, but could you make adjustments to your website's marketing strategy that would speed up the process?

But how would you go about making adjustments? You'd want to be sure that you're not taking any steps backward. You need to know that the changes you make are based on data.

To do that, you'd need to start collecting data about your website. Fortunately, Google offers a free tool called Google Analytics. There are other website tracking and metric tools, but this one is free and will provide you with as much data as you'll need to develop a basic website analytics program.

With it, you'll have access to a bunch of data about your site visitors and how they interact with the pages of your website. You'll be able to see which pages are receiving the most traffic, how users got there, where they go next, how long they stay on the page, and more.

With information like this, you can make improvements to your website based on data.

For example, let's say that you have a webpage that highlights one of the services that you offer. Your plan is that users would discover this page, learn about your service and then click to the webpage where they can ask for a quote.

However, you can see, after reviewing the Google Analytics data that users are actually clicking back to the home page. This could mean a couple of things:

• The content on your page isn't doing a good job at converting page visitors to prospective customers
• The page doesn't make it clear that the next step is to request a quote

With this information, you could respond by improving the sales quality of your webpage - enticing the page visitor to learn more, or make it more obvious that the next step is to request a quote. That could result in a more obvious button to visit the next page, a change of color, or even including the form on the same page - removing a step and making the sales funnel more concise.

The point is that you're making adjustments based on data that you're seeing - not your gut instinct, or not based on your opinion alone.

This could also save you time - why are you making certain adjustments to the website if the data doesn't support that those changes be made?

There can easily exist a perception that having a successful, growth-oriented website while basing your company in less-populated area like New Hampshire is more challenging.

The distance between you and the majority of larger business in cities like Boston may be greater, making those companies feel almost out of reach.

Maybe you also have felt that the quality of website developers and marketing agencies in New Hampshire are sub-par compared to the more elite agencies in cities like Boston, Hartford or New York.

Being from New Hampshire ourselves, we know first-hand what it's like to feel overlooked and be concerned that maybe our efforts don't result in the same business success as similar companies in larger cities.

Having distance could certainly make a business impact if you're unwilling or unable to meet clients face-to-face as they may prefer to do at times, however, you must believe that your website is not at a disadvantage.

The internet is generally a level playing field. The success of your website can really be impacted by the choices you make and those alone. The quality of your website can even be great enough to convince clients who typically only work with Boston-area businesses - to work with you instead.

The steps listed above:

1. Setting realistic expectations
2. Focusing on what matters
3. Identifying a strategy that makes sense for you
4. Being consistent
5. Reviewing and adapting

... are what you need for success, wherever you are.

Businesses in New Hampshire are not at a disadvantage.

• You can leverage the same high-performance website hosting that the big companies do.
• You can have a beautiful design.
• You can produce even better page content.
• You can outrank other companies in search engines.

Your hard work will return the same results. You can certainly work harder than larger, Boston-based businesses do, but that's not a requirement. Just have and follow a plan. Doing so will actually put you ahead of most businesses - and not just other businesses in rural areas like New Hampshire.

After years in the business and helping to launch dozens of websites and web-based applications, we feel like we have a good understanding for what it takes to have a successful website - one that isn't just a nice website but actually grows your business.

We've outlined most of that above, but to recap:

We're familiar with the stresses that most people feel toward their website.

There can be a feeling of hopelessness, websites can feel overly expensive, and that's tough when there lacks any real results.

And we understand where those stresses come from.

Website owners and managers having wrong expectations from the start, seeing other companies succeed, and having a lack of a clear strategy.

So we can respond to these challenges by:

1. Setting realistic expectations: not negative, but smart so that we know exactly what to do, where we want to go and how to get there.
2. Focusing on what matters: design is fun, but don't let it take up all of your time and energy.
3. Identifying a strategy that makes sense for you: what resources do you have? What does a successful and manageable plan look like to you?
4. Being consistent: once you have your plan, stick to it. Set realistic goals that you know you can achieve.
5. Reviewing and adapting: get closer to your success by analyzing and responding to real data insights.

And no, you're not at a disadvantage just because your company is located in New Hampshire.

What does a website development project look like with ZeroToDigital?

It's really a collaboration between us, the developers and strategists and you, the representative from your business. It's important to have a solid understand of your business and its goals in order to set you up with a website that you can use to grow your business. But, before we start, we'll sign a document so that you know anything you say to us will be kept confidential.

There will be emails and at least a couple of meetings to make sure we're on the same page before getting started, to provide feedback on the proposal that we'll send to you (which will include details such as timing and costs), and to allow you to make any number of changes you'd like to the website.

It's important to us that we've helped you realize your vision for the new website. It's also worth knowing that when we launch the site, we can continue to provide changes, add or remove functionalities, pages, etc. There is no "template" - we can create anything that you can envision - as long as the technology exists for it!

You should also know that the website will be 100% yours. We can provide hosting and help with managing domains, databases, etc. But if you ever decide to take it somewhere else, it's yours to do with as you wish and we can help you with any necessary transfers.

Pricing and timeline estimates will come from our discussions with you - based on the pages and functionalities to be included, and the level of support you're able to provide on your end.

Everything is 100% customized to you, your needs, your situation, your business. So if you're interested in learning more about starting a website development project with us, please send us an email and we'll get back to you!