Web Design Experts
Your Success Agency

We know you have lots of choices when it comes to picking a web design agency. Some clients like to pick a web designer near them; others like to pick one that has designed a website in their niche or vertical; both approaches work. At Seota, we believe you should pick the best web design firm with the best team of web designers and web developers that can deliver within your budget. A great website is the marriage of design and web development skills.

Seota is a digital marketing company that prides itself on having the perfect mix of talented designers and web developers to accomplish the most elegant websites that are easy to manage and lightning-fast for your end users. While working with the Seota custom design team, your thoughts and vision for a dynamic customer experience will come to life.

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The Best Web Design to Fit Your Objectives and Budget

We have the best web designers at Seota, but our real differentiator is focusing our design team on your business objectives while keeping your end users in mind. This allows us to create a plan to achieve a fantastic user experience delivered on time and within your budget.

When we ask about your web development budget, it is so that we can tailor the website project resources to your specific needs and give you guidance on what you can achieve for your budget.

Ready to hire the best web design company? Let’s Get Started.

Ten Principles Of a Great Design Agency

At Seota, we have ten (10) principles we built our web design team around, and we believe that all the best web design agencies should be able to deliver on all 10.

1. Creative and innovative: A professional web company will be able to come up with unique and creative ideas and a user experience (UX) that will set your website apart from your competitors.
2. User-focused: A great web design agency will prioritize best practices focused on the users’ needs and design a website that loads fast, is easy to use, is visually appealing, and is highly functional.
3. Experienced: The best web design company should have a proven track record and a design portfolio of successful website design projects for clients across various industries.
4. Technically strong: A talented website design agency will have strong technical skills focused on web development, including HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and responsive design principles.
5. Collaborative: A strong web design company will be able to work closely with you to understand your business objectives, target audience, customer journeys, and branding.

6. Communication skills: A great web design agency will have excellent communication skills tied to processes designed to keep you updated on the progress of your project.
7. Detail-oriented: A great web design company will be attentive to details, primarily details essential to your project’s success.
8. Supportive: The best web design companies can provide ongoing technical support and maintenance to keep your website running smoothly.
9. Cost-effective: A great web design company will offer transparent pricing and be able to work within your budget without compromising on quality.
10. Adaptable: The best website design companies can adapt to changing trends and technologies to ensure your website remains relevant and up-to-date.

A Web Design Agency Defined

A web design company is a team of professionals, with different skill sets, that work together to design and develop websites and digital experiences.

Top web design companies typically produce and manage the process of:

• Planning a website
• Producing web graphics and images
• Architecting the structure & taxonomy of the web design project
• Ensure colors, text styles, and fonts align with the brand style guide or objectives.
• In some instances, they produce web content, and occasionally, they only manage content the client provides.

A good website company will produce a custom, responsive website for your company that is on brand and helps your business achieve its goals.

The internet is home to 1.8 BILLION websites, but it is estimated that only 15% of them are active. It is important to build a website and plan how to drive traffic to your site with Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO.

What Do the Best Web Design Agencies Do?

Full-service web design agencies offer a number of services that revolve around creating a customer-facing marketing portal for your brand.

Different agencies use different processes to design your website. Some start by creating a site map, others create a content plan and produce the sitemap from that, and some web design companies do a visual scope to start the process. Modern web design firms use Adobe XD and Figma to design websites; some web development companies still use Adobe Photoshop.

At Seota, we use a hybrid approach to design a flexible website based on the size and scope of the web design project. To start, we design the home page. The home page is the most important page on the website, and we don’t do anything until our design team creates a home page and the client is happy.

Once the home page is improved, we design the other significant page templates for the site theme. Not every web page needs a unique design. Your agency may only produce 4-10 page templates for a large website. Don’t be alarmed; that is quite common.

Once all the designs are approved, the best web agencies follow a “slice then integrate” process. This means that each unique web template is turned into standalone static HTML by a web developer. We let the client approve the HTML pages before we code them to the CMS. The best agencies do this because it allows the client to interact with the design as a web page. Occasionally a section that looked great in design does not work great in HTML.

Some Web agencies only do design, and they don’t do web development. At Seota, we work with a couple of ad agencies that produce beautiful designs, but they don’t code. We act as their web development team firm.

Are There Different Types Of Web Design Companies?

Yes, there is a wide variety of web design company business models, and it can be confusing when your business needs to hire an agency. Based on your needs and objectives, picking the wrong type of agency can slow your project and waste your money.

At Seota, we categorize our competition in a way that may be helpful for you to use when evaluating an agency.

What Services does an web design agency offer?

Do they offer a full suite of services like us or do they specialize? Agencies that specialize typically focus on:

• Design: Typically, an ad agency will only do design, and they do not write code or they outsource the development.
• Web Development: We have competitors that only develop sophisticated web applications; the design is an afterthought.
• Theme Stuffing: These web design firms buy an inexpensive theme that was designed and developed by a 3rd party, and they change images, add content and change some colors to produce a unique website. These agencies are becoming prevalent. Most broken projects that we are hired to fix were started by a theme-stuffing agency.
• The platforms:
  For instance, at Seota we specialize in WordPress as our main platform. We once specialized in Drupal and Joomla as well, but we no longer accept those projects. Today, there are low-code and no-code web platforms, like WebFlow, that allows designers to use drag-and-drop tools to create a website. If you are hiring an agency, find one that can guide you on the right platform or hire one that specializes in the platform you want to use.
• Size of businesses they work with:
  Some agencies only work with small local businesses. Those businesses have less demanding needs and often don’t need sophisticated help. At Seota, we like to work with mid-market and growing businesses. Some agencies only work with fortune 500 companies.
• The niches they serve:
  Some web design companies decide early on to specialize in a niche. We have a competitor that only builds websites for plastic surgeons. A few years ago, we purchased a small agency that only worked with restaurants. At Seota we are not niche-specific, but we do work with a lot of B2B and MSP companies.

How Do Web Design Companies Charge For Their Services?

Web Design fees and billing structures differ greatly, and they don’t always reflect the quality you are getting.

An Hourly Design Fee

This pricing model is common on both ends of the spectrum. BIG AGENCY and freelancers typically charge by the hour. Big web design companies do it at prices ranging from $150-$250 per hour, depending on the staff working on your project. Other large agencies do a blended rate, where they bill you an expected average hourly rate for all resources.

Freelancers bill by the hour because the market they serve dictates it, and they are typically less sophisticated at estimating a project cost.

If you’re hiring a top boutique agency in the US, you can anticipate the hourly fees to range between $100-$185 /hour. If you are brave and think you can manage an overseas agency, you can expect to pay much less. Real web agencies overseas will bill between $45-$85 USD. Freelances will range from $10-$100 per hour.

Fee Per Project

Typically, at Seota, we use a Fee Per Project billing model for web design. This model allows our clients to have a firm budget based on the scope of what they require. There is a risk for the client and the agency in this model. The fee-per-project model is the most common fee structure for agencies large and small.