ALASKA WEB DESIGN! Local designers, local businesses!
These days, you can hire a web designer anywhere…but that doesn’t mean you should.
Technology has enabled businesses to be able to look outside their cities, states, and even countries for outsourced help. However, there can be unintended drawbacks of this newfound freedom. From working with hundreds of clients – most of them local Alaska web design projects – we’ve seen the benefits of working locally. We’ve also heard about the potential issues these clients experience when they choose designers that they can’t meet with face-to-face.
Read on to learn from some of our experiences, and to understand why going local could be best for your business.
Nothing Can Replace Face to Face Communication
Web design is both an art and a science – and as such, face-to-face communication results in the best work from your web designer. In-person meetings and feedback create collaboration and understanding that email, video chat, or instant messaging can’t. Fifty-five percent of effective communication comes from body language, and you’re much more likely to get your point across about what you want when you are in person and using both visual and auditory messages.
Face-to-face meetings are also ideal for understanding if the web designer you’re looking to hire is legitimate. Unfortunately, many web design businesses pretend to be who they’re not, in the form of fake reviews or clients, employees, or office spaces. When your web designer is local, you’re able to quickly get a feel for what’s real and what isn’t.
Alaskan Web Designers Know Alaskan Businesses
As web designers in Alaska, we know our local businesses well. When Kaladi Brothers approached us to help redesign their new website, we were already familiar with their business, style, and tone since they’re in our community. This resulted in better communication, more understanding of the aesthetic they were going for, and a huge jump in business. After our redesign, they experienced a 126 percent increase in eCommerce revenue.
The additional benefit is that many local businesses will want to target similar, local customers. Both Kaladi and Av-STEM Alaska (another client of ours) may want to reach young Alaskans and could benefit from knowing each other. It also means that at Hype, we’ve been able to develop specific expertise in targeting this narrow audience.
Local Web Designers Benefit From Their Ecosystem and Networks
The Alaska web design community is friendly, and we’re able to refer work to other agencies in the area when we don’t have the right experience or enough bandwidth for a particular project. This creates trust and cooperation that makes your project even more seamless and gets you to the right type of web designer quickly. After all, local agencies have more of their reputation at stake than an agency elsewhere that’s not in your community and that you may never see or hear from again.
When you work with local web designers, you also enjoy the benefit of easily being able to ask for references you can trust. We receive many of our new clients from referrals from other local Alaska web design clients, since they’re all in the same community and often have a similar target audience. A referral doesn’t mean as much when it comes from a business you’ve never heard of.
No More Time Zone Issues
Some businesses find that they can shave off some of the cost of web design by outsourcing to different countries. Besides the reasons listed above, this can cause huge issues when they run into time zone differences – which begs the question, is that marginal amount saved really worth it?
If you need an urgent change made to your site, you won’t be able to get much done if it’s 3 AM where your web design agency is located. Getting quick feedback and communication can also be burdensome, on top of potential language or cultural barriers.
