Web Design - Graphic Design - SEO - Digital Marketing

Upstate SC Website Design

Clemson Web Design provides affordable web design services for Oconee County, Anderson County, & Greenville Areas.

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Affordable Website Solutions For Your Growing Upstate South Carolina Company.

Break digital barriers without the ridiculous overhead cost of large web design agencies or the race to the bottom pricing gimmicks of most freelancers. 

Clemson Web Design helps you get the most return for your investment with modern, great looking and professional website solutions.

Upstate South Carolina's Affordable Website Design Company

Clemson Web Design is a professional web design company that has been serving Upstate SC with professional website design services for over 10 years. 

Having worked with leaders in a wide array of businesses in South Carolina. We hope our short but detailed website insights provide useful information for businesses owners looking to build a website.

Contact Daniel today for a free website consultation, informative proposal, and itemized quote.

Free Website Design Consultation & Proposals For Upstate SC

Clemson Web Design has created websites for all kinds of businesses in all kinds of industrys. Businesses that are trying to get a competitive edge and fuel their growth by harnessing the power and reach of the internet

Modern Professional Website Design

Regardless of your location. The basic outline and steps needed to get a small business website up and running is mostly universal.  Reach out today to let Clemson Web Design help guide your online website ventures.

Lets Get Started - Identity, Branding & Logo

Before you even begin thinking about a professional website. You need to be prepared and be at a point where you have the content, branding, images and tools needed to create a website and web presence.

It also goes without saying that you need business branding and a logo. Not just for your website but for anything business related. You want a Logo that portrays your business and your services as quickly and easily as possible.

Logo Design Company in Seneca SC

Try to avoid Logos that are complex and that have too many colors. Try to also avoid Logos that are generic and lame. When you decide on branding for your Upstate SC business, you want something original, something bold and something thats going to let your target audience exactly what it is that your business does.

Do your research. Don’t choose a logo branding that is too similar to any possible competition, and make sure you’re not stepping on anyone else’s toes.

Google My Business for Upstate Businesses

One of the most essential steps for any business or website in Upstate South Carolina is to set up and claim their Google My Business listing. Google’s My Business controls the local map pack listing that appears when you search for specific terms related to your industry and business.

Fill out the entire My Business profile and don’t skip any steps. Be sure to add as much detail as you possibly can.

Google My Business

It’s also crucial that you maintain consistency in your business details across the internet. The business information you list in Google My Business should be the same information you list on other sites like Yelp, Facebook and Commerce directories.

Local Upstate South Carolina Business Competition Research

Your next step in getting your business ready for a website should be researching your competition. When I say researching, I don’t mean just seeing that they exist. I mean to really take a look at their business and see what they are doing well and discover what you could be doing better. 

Let’s say you’re going to start a website design company in Anderson SC. What you want to do is take a look at other other local website design agencies in the same and surrounding Upstate South Carolina areas.

Start a list on paper or in a spreadsheet. Fill it with the details of your competition. A list of 3 local competitors located in your immediate market is a good place to start. In that list, include their website urls, their services, prices, their hours, and really take a look if they take a priority and interest into any specific areas of their website. You’re going to collect this information and dig into their website so that you can learn from their mistakes and experience.

Website Audit SEO Upstate South Carolina

If you find a competitor’s website to be old, dated and doesn’t look like it’s really performing for their business. Cross it off your list. You want to focus on actual competition that is invested in their website and internet presence. Someone that’s neglected their website to the point of decay is of no concern to us. The goal is the lead the competition, not drag behind them.

Business competition is pretty fierce in Upstate SC due to the ever encroaching Greenville SC. The more you know about your competitor the better off you will be in the long run. The next step is to do some basic technical research.

Competition Website SEO Audit

Once you have your list of your local competitors and their website urls. It’s time to really take a close look at the content on their website. There’s many Seach Engine Optimization tools you can use, but Clemson Web Design uses SEM Rush and Spotibo.

For this article’s purposes, I’m using SEM Rush for basic keyword research. They offer a limited free trial plan that’s more than capable for basic research. How to do Keyword research is beyond the scope of this article. Please contact me if you need assistance.

Upstate SC Web Design Audit

Evaluate The Results Of Your Audits

Take a look at search engine results and ask yourself. Are these keywords relevant to your business? Will these keywords drive traffic to your business? Are these keywords worth pursuing? How competitive are these keywords? If your answer is “I dont know”, then it’s time to consult with a Upstate SC Search Engine Optimization Expert that can help you answer these questions.

After you have completed your keyword research and decided on which keywords you should target with your business. Move on to the backlink section of SEM Rush. Plug in your competitors url.

The backlink functions of SEM Rush will tell you who is linking to your competition’s website and vice versa. This is important to know because you will eventually need backlinks for your own website and you want to know the linking opportunities that may exist.

Websites linking to each other form the backbone of how search engines will judge and subsequently rank your Upstate SC business website. 

Google Business
SEO Audit Points
Design & UX
Website Goals

Upstate SC Website Structure Strategy

Hopefully you paid attention to your competitions websites during the SEO and competition research. It’s important to come up with your website’s structure before you move forward implementing it. Your website structure is the layout and networking of content pages that make up your website. Website structures will be different based on the websites goal, industry and purpose.

Where a national eCommerce website might have a lot of categories, thousands of products, search functions and numerous web pages. A local small service based business in Upstate South Carolina websites structure might only have 5 to 10 pages of purely informational content. Website structure can get really technical and is an area where hiring a professional website designer is critical. 

What is website structure? Your site's structure is how the different pages on your site are linked with each other using internal links and their hierarchy.
Upstate SC Website Structure

Design & UX Considerations For Your Website

Design and UX is an area where there really is no replacement for a professional Upstate SC web design agency. We were taught that the idea of design and art in general, is subjective to the viewer’s personal opinions. As in, What may look like a good design to some people may look horrible to other people.

Web Design & Web Development

While this line of thinking works for a lot of instances of art. It doesn’t ring true for website design in a competitive market like the upstate of SC. Design trends, technology and fads change. The core of a good user experience doesn’t.

For your website to compete in the upstate sc search engine market and convert visitors into customers. You want your website to portray your message as easily and as quickly as possible. You want distinct branding, easy on the eyes text, and a clear easy user path to conversion.

Website Design, Goals & Conversions

It’s imperative that your website has clear goals and the website design drives your visitors to an action. Whether it be sign up for a email newsletter, buying a product or simply sending you an email.  Your upstate SC business website design needs to have clear goals and an easy user experience pathway to obtain those goals.

Clemson Web Design has years of experience in high conversion website design and is the most experienced web design company in Upstate SC. With that said. We can send traffic to your website all day long but if your website does not convert that traffic into paying customers, then all of your efforts are in null.

If you are an upstate sc business looking to increase the return on your website or looking to build a new website. Please contact us today for a free website consultation. 

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Content Creation for Upstate SC Website Designs

Content is the words, images and elements that make up your website. It’s what gives your website purpose and helps portray your message to your visitors. Remember the keyword and competition research we did above? Content creation is the step where you put those keywords and analytics to use.

Lets say your business web design is going to have 4 pages for its core structure.

Basic Page Structure:

This page structure is the most basic and most used structure for a small business web design in Upstate SC. In general. You want each specific page to reach a end user goal. The goal in this instance would be a contact. You want a visitor to contact you for your lawn services.

Home Page: The text content on your home page needs to be at the least 600 words and it needs to be optimized. When optimizing your content. Be sure to include keywords that you got from your research above. You want to make the text as organic and as easy to read as possible. Don’t resort to keyword stuffing or low effort attempts. You want the text on your website to be authentic and you want it to be original.

About Page: You generally want 400 to 600 minimum words telling your customer about your business, what you offer and why they should choose your services over the competition.

Services Page: A good quality services page is going to go into detail about the services and/or products that your business offers. Again, it’s going to include your target keywords, references to your local region (city, state etc) and it’s going to link to other pages. One page service pages are the most basic structure of a service-based business website. Over time it’s important to follow a silo url structure and to build out your services pages to be as detailed as possible.

Contact Page: is one that is simple and direct to the point. On your contact page you should have your phone number, your social media accounts, your email and depending on your business, your physical address. It’s very important that you keep your email form easy and make the path to the goal (The button to email or call) is clearly laid out.

Web Page Content Length Makes A Difference

The goal of your content is to provide the website visitor with the information they are looking for in the easiest way possible. While there are some niches and industries that can get by with thin low word count content.

Most websites in general greatly benefit when they implement long form content strategies. Long form content is 1000+ highly optimized content that focuses not only on conversion, but on relevant rich keywords.

Local Content Strategy Targeted At The Upstate

When writing the content for your website it’s important to consider the local cities and regions that you are trying to target.

It’s critical that your website makes references to Upstate SC areas and regions like Anderson SC, Greenville SC, Greer, Spartanburg and so on. Including location keywords in your content will signal search engines that your website is relevant to the locations in your content. 

South Carolina's Best Website Design Portfolio

Professional Website Platforms For Your Upstate Business

The best website platform to use for your Upstate SC business website is a long conversation and is ever changing. A few years ago I would have told you Magento was the go-to eCommerce platform and 10 years ago I would have told you that a static php custom built website was the way forward.

Technology is evolving so fast now that you have AI generated websites, marketing platforms and SaaS websites. Companies in this category are Wix and SquareSpace. While Wix and SquareSpace are great services if you are technologically capable of building a nice website on them. Most people that try to save a dollar by building a website on their own with these platforms fail miserably.

Website Platforms Upstate SC

I can tell you from actual experience. The go-to website platforms for most small business websites are mainly WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify. We build most of our recent upstate SC website designs on WordPress and WooCommerce platforms. 

Clemson Web Design has experience working with WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, CraftCMS. With over 15 years of web development and web design experience. We offer in house front end development services for virtually any website platform.

 

Hosting Services For Upstate SC Business Websites

Web hosting refers to the servers and back end infrastructure that serve your website on the internet. The quality of your web host is the most single influential performance factor of your website. You can have the best website in the world but if your hosting environment is slow and unoptimized. Your website is going to be slow.

Website Hosting Company Upstate SC

Website hosting comes in all sorts of flavors but to break it down in simpleton terms. You have managed hosting and unmanaged hosting.

Managed hosting is when the hosting company’s team of professionals handles all of the backend servers and backend server issues. You rely on them to keep your hosting servers running and your website live on the internet.  

Unmanaged hosting is when you are renting a server space and you take over administration of that server via the hosting company interface. That means you are responsible for maintaining the server, the databases, the patches and the technology stacks that serve your website. 

Unless you are a enterprise client, like playing server administrator, or doing a good amount of sales to justify hiring a server administrator. I recommend most people go with managed hosting.

Search Engine Optimization Services That Fuel Upstate SC Businesses

Clemson Web Design Provides Geographically Targeted Website Design & Search Engine Optimization. Target Your Local Market & Fuel Your Business.

Clemson Web Design

Request For Proposal (RFP)

At this point you should have enough information to build a Request For Proposal. A RFP is a document written by your company and provided to the prospective website designer.

A RFP provides the information a prospective Upstate SC Web Design Company would need to accurately bid and quote your new website development. A RFP isn’t for everyone and is not required but it sure does make the quoting process easier.

Your RFP should outline your business goal and move on to the website. It should state your website goals, your needed functionality, a place to view any existing website, a sample of your content and or project scope. 

Use Your Knowledge To Guide Your Expectations

Now that you have tons of information and are prepared, you can start the actual process or building your business website and digital presence

You should have a pretty good idea of your branding, your website structure, your design, your competition research data, an idea of your best website platform, and your server hosting environment.

Upstate SC Web Design

Diversity In Your Web Design Quotes

The next step in moving forward with a website design quote is to reach out to web design companies and start getting quotes. Go ahead and call 3 or 4 web design companies and compare a few key items. .

Now that you have quotes from other web design agencies. Give Clemson Web Design a call for a free consultation. We are confident we can produce a better website at the same, if not better pricing points

Avoid Pricing Gimmicks

Watch for the classic bait and switch sales tactics. The website development industry is largely self regulated. Marketing Agencies and salesmen like to play as middle men, charging a premium and outsourcing the work. This is a recipe for disaster.

Be sure you verify the experience, reputation and portfolio of any Upstate SC Web Design Company you hire.

If the web design company does not itemize their quotes. Why not? If you notice small up-charges like basic SEO ( Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, ALT Tags), Photo Galleries, Social media integration etc etc. They are likely up-charging for basic features.

 

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Clemson Web Design has partnered with Nexcess and Liquid Web to bring our Upstate SC Web Design clients top-tier managed cloud hosting solutions. Our long relationship with Nexcess gives us direct server support and the confidence to exclusively use their services for our clients hosting needs. The best support in the industry coupled with fast servers means a win-win for South Carolina businesses.

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