Web Design and Development
E-Commerce Solutions for
Saskatchewan Businesses
Many Saskatchewan business owners have a sense of their website’s importance. What’s harder to detect is the cost of a mediocre website. It’s that customer who leaves a website that loads slowly on their phone, the quote form that is never submitted because the contact request form is buried too deep, and the competition in Saskatoon or Regina who ranks on the first page of Google because their website was built to be found.
A website is no longer a digital business card. It’s the first and often the most important conversation that a potential customer or client has with your business. Regina’s established firms and the quickly growing businesses of Warman need websites the work for them, earn trust instantaneously, and help them be found on search results. They also need a website that loads quickly and helps them convert leads.
At Burnaby Digital Media, we have a different perspective when building web design solutions for Saskatchewan business. We consider web design as a Saskatchewan business’s infrastructure, not decoration. This page describes some aspects of professional web design and web development, and helps identify if your current web design is supporting your business.
Why Professional Web Design Matters for Saskatchewan Businesses
With a competitive market, a visitor to your website forms an opinion that ultimately impacts your bottom line. Slow load time, design that is not mobile friendly, and an overall design that is outdated creates risk and causes potential customers to leave your website and visit your competition.
Local searches on phones are most likely to occur while a consumer is deciding where to get lunch, who to hire, or which shop to enter on a given day. Your customers are not able to reach your phone number if your site is not optimized for mobile devices.
Strong web design leads to outcomes that are important to Saskatchewan businesses – customer trust, visibility in Google’s local search results, and constant leads. Your enterprise competes side by side with larger enterprises when you have a competent website. It ranks your website for the queries that your consumers search for in Saskatoon, Regina and the adjacent areas and gives every visit a clear suggestion of the next step. In this case, design is not the end goal – it is the component that makes trust, traffic, and conversions possible.
Web Design Services for Businesses in Saskatchewan
In the context of website design, selection of colors is the least important part of the process. Effective web design starts with strategy. It consists of knowing your audience, what they will need to make them act, and the approach of your web design in getting your audience to where you want them to be on your site.
Our web design services offer Saskatchewan businesses a full-service package:
- UX/UI designs that help users navigate your website with ease
- Structuring site pages through the lens of consumers
- Responsive mobile UI designs that appear correctly and perform optimally on various devices
- Design structurally with prominent calls to action, contact information, and lead forms placed strategically for optimal conversion
- Designs incorporating your brand’s visual identity
- Implementation of accessibility and SEO-friendly page structures within your site design
- Effective web design is about intent. Every design choice must encourage users to make that call, make that reservation, or make that purchase.
Custom-built Web Designs for Business Growth
Design is about the look and feel of a website. Development is about the ease and reliability of a site when your business grows.
Before visitors see your website, developers ensure your website is easy to use, secure, and fast. We utilize the appropriate development platform, whether it be WordPress, custom-built web designs, or headless CMS. Our development is executed with well-structured code that keeps your website loading quickly and holds up under an enormous amount of traffic.
Solid development includes the important considerations to safeguard your investment such as reliable integrations and stable hosting. Additionally, development should include tools that let you see how your website is performing, such as bookings, integrations with CRMs, payment tools, email systems, structured data, and clean URLs. Technology SEO should be dealt with at the development stage because it affects site structure and performance.
Site performance isn’t a rigid benchmark. It’s about how your site compares to your competitors, how long it takes to load, and how responsive it is. A well designed site will grow with your business. Poor development makes it likely your business will have outgrow your site and it will need to be completely rebuilt in a few years.
E-Commerce Website Development in Saskatchewan
Online stores give Saskatchewan businesses a way to sell products and services to new customers in the province, across Canada, and beyond. E-commerce, when done right, gives businesses the ability to sell 24/7 without the need to hire new employees.
Your catalog, your workforce, and your business goals all decide which platform fits your store best. We develop stores on the platforms that accommodate real Saskatchewan-based businesses:
- Developed Shopify stores for merchants who want to establish a low maintenance and quick to launch store, as well as an easy to use store day to day.
- Developed WooCommerce stores for those who want a fully integrated store and content control and already operate within a WordPress based business.
- For those with specialized workflows, product logic, or integrations that require flexibility, custom e-commerce solutions are available.
A store goes beyond a product grid. We put together organized product catalogues, secure payment gateways for Canadian friendly transactions, shipping and taxes set up and synced with inventory that tracks with your operations. From a customer perspective, it means organized product search and filtering, customer accounts, reviews, and a checkout that minimizes cart abandonment.
As mobile is the primary platform for online shopping, every single store we build puts mobile as the top priority with fast loading times, ease of navigation, and a simplified purchasing process. We take care of the less-visible tasks that generate revenue for your store: SEO optimized pages for products and categories, conversion tracking, and security for your customers’ transactions. The success of your store should be gauged by the same metrics as all sales channels: orders, average value, and loyal customers.
Web Design in Saskatoon
Websites built to best cater to the Saskatoon market provide much more than a list of available services. They consider how people in Saskatoon search and make decisions.
For Saskatoon web design, that often means good local search visibility, content designed for the districts, and neighborhoods they serve, and a clear path from “found you on Google” to “contacted you.” A well designed website, in Saskatoon, connects a business to the customers searching for the business’s service, and motivates those customers to choose that business over its local competition. Local Saskatoon web design businesses, from WordPress builds to Saskatoon e-commerce web design, aim to create websites that build local trust and turn local searches into local customers.
Web Design in Regina
The business community of Regina contains government services, professional services, trade services, retail, and an abundance of independent businesses, and each of these varies in how they address their market online.
When building a website around measurable goals, more inquiries lead to more bookings and sales. For service businesses, this goal translates to a website designed to generate leads for service quotes. A Regina retailer could have a web page with a functioning online store to support their goal of offering customers the ability to order their products online. The best way to ensure website success in Regina is the combination of optimized SEO, fast site performance, and user-centered design. This ensures that not only will your website reflect your business, but that it will be your highest customer acquisition channel. Whether you are a Regina business looking for a new WordPress website or a new online Shopify store, the most important aspect should be a website that allows you to measure your success.
Website Design for Expanding Communities, Warman and Martensville
The communities around the outskirts of Saskatoon like Warman and Martensville are some of the fastest growing in Saskatchewan. This growth is due to the influx of new residents as well as new businesses with a need for trades and services, as well as retail, food, and professional businesses.
New communities have a false sense ofdigital sophistication. For businesses in locations like Warman and Martensville, a strong website is a key component to capturing new customers. New residents often rely on online searches to help them find businesses. While companies may thrive in larger urban centers, businesses located outside major urban centers have the opportunity to be the first and only company in the area.
Why Local Web Design Is A Better Option
Other agencies can build a website. Very few understand the market they’ll be required to operate in. Working with a company in Saskatchewan means your website will be designed in a way that resonates with the local market in terms of search, shop, and decision behaviors.
That shows up in several aspects of daily operations.
- Custom strategies built for Saskatchewan customers — not mass-produced.
- Local SEO strategies built to empower Saskatoon, Regina, and the smaller communities surrounding them.
- A communication partner built for you, on your terms.
- Continued focus on the long-term goal of fully supporting you.
- A strategy built specifically to achieve your personalized goals and within your given budget.
Our goal is to help our clients across Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Alberta. With that goal in mind, we are able to provide our clients with localized services and support, while still retaining the support and experience we gain working with many clients in other areas. This allows us to build a web strategy that is unique to your market, and not just one we stole from another market.
What Characteristics Define a Successful Business Website?
The traits of most successful websites aren’t haphazard. All business websites exist for a reason, and usually, those reasons aren’t technical. Successful websites:
- are optimized for speed
- slow pages drive visitors away and rank below others
- prioritize mobile experience – most of the website’s traffic is on mobile
- offer secure connection with HTTPS – users don’t trust websites that aren’t secure and won’t enter details
- are optimized for search engines to be able to find them (SEO) – the website’s beauty is for ought if it’s not accessible
- are clear and have an easy to navigate user experience – your website should not confuse users
- are built to convert every visitor to a buyer or customer
- are easily accessible
- can be easily scaled and managed
- have clear calls to action
- you should tell your website’s visitors what the next step is
- have tracking and analytics – you should measure if you want to improve
A website that checks these boxes is modern. But more importantly, it’s a value adding and continuously working resource for your business.
Local SEO and Website Design for Saskatchewan Businesses
Website design and Local SEO overlap – both are a means to an end, and that end is converting customers, especially local customers, where local SEO comes into play.
Several parts come together to develop effective local SEO for businesses in Saskatchewan: an optimized Google Business Profile, location-relevant service pages, rich structure data, clean on-page SEO, internal linking, and local content. For businesses that span multiple regions, the creation of dedicated local landing pages will assist you in ranking in the regions that you operate in.
It is important to understand what local SEO is not. Stuffing your web pages with Saskatoon or Regina will not improve your rankings; search engines have long outgrown that practice. Real local SEO is relevance, site quality, technical health, and authority signals such as reviews and consistent business information. When a website is constructed with this intentionality from the onset, ranking comes a lot easier than if trying to retrofit this later.
An Overview of the Website Design and Development Process
To successfully complete a project, a step-by-step plan is essential. Here is the design and development process from idea to result:
- Discovery – learning about your business and your customers and their needs
- Strategy – developing the end goal of the site and how we define success
- Sitemap and information architecture – page mapping around how customers search
- UX/UI design – creating designs with the end goal of site conversion
- Content strategy – developing the site’s content to best speak to your customers
- Development – building a fast, secure and scalable website
- SEO – Technical and On-page SEO
- Testing – validation of the site’s performance
- Launch – with assurance
- Optimization – with actual results
Why Your Website Should Be Built for Conversions, Not Just Appearance
While having an attractive website is helpful for a business, it is important to note the main objective of a website should be a business performing website. A website that can perform is differentiated from an aesthetically pleasing site by its ability to convert impressions to customers.
A website that serves as an online brochure may be good looking, but fails to perform a business function. A website focused on conversion defines specific processes such as goal completion for phone calls, quote requests, contact form completion, booking requests, purchases, and newsletter signups.
Design helps you understand the user journey so you can create personalized offers, understand where potential customers are in the decision process, eliminate form and checkout friction, AND optimize your landing pages based on how users engage with your page to see what is most effective. These insights are how you create products on your website knowing they will help, instead of hoping they will.
A results-driven website gives you an indication of how well your efforts are working. With the right insights, each element of your website serves a purpose with your business goals in mind. Your website becomes a tool that sells your product the moment you open the doors for business. It works even if your doors are closed.
Ready to build your website?
Let’s build some profitable strategy together. Call Burnaby Digital Media today!