You probably don't need a new website. The longer a website is online, the more value it gains. Google crawls your pages. Other people link to your content. Your "Domain Authority" builds up.
We've heard other marketing firms advise prospects that if it's been 3 or 4 years, it's time for a new website. Hogwash! Why scrap something that's building up value, toss it all and start over? The argument is that a lot of old content confuses your visitors, may send mixed messages. And while we whole-heartedly agree that you should curate your main landing pages and user-experience to direct people where you want them to go, if you have a half-way decent site already it's far more cost effective to change and evolve your current site than to throw out what you have and start over.
Instead of spending on big site overhauls, it's far better to pinpoint what is holding your site back, and work on making your existing site more effective. This is a constant, ongoing process, quite similar to the ongoing work needed on a rental property. You need somebody watching over the place, fixing things as they break, collecting rent, periodically re-painting the building, doing the gardening and landscaping.
That's where Freelock comes in. We start by appraising your current website property across the key areas all websites need to consider -- many of these areas sorely neglected by other website companies. We then provide recommendations on what most needs attention, and provide all the services needed to bring it up to snuff.
We group our recommendations and services into 6 key areas -- 3 that represent your assets, and 3 areas of technical debt.
| Assets | Debts |
|---|---|
| Reach -- how many people are aware of your site and company thanks to marketing efforts that largely take place away from your site | Security -- risks associated with having a site on the Internet |
| Engagement -- how effective your site is at converting visitors to customers, supporting visitors' goals, and providing direct value to your organization | Performance -- potential lost visitors due to your site being sluggish or incapable of handling spikes in traffic |
| Delivery -- Various ways your website saves you money, streamlines operations, helps your employees deliver, manages stuff | User Experience -- people unable to accomplish their goals on the site because it's frustrating to use, requires knowledge of hidden functionality, or lags behind its competition |
Website Appraisals and Assessments
Most of our customers begin with an appraisal. Our appraisal provides a basic assessment and valuation across the 6 key areas we cover, and provides recommendations on what to do next.
Many sites need more than a basic appraisal, so we've packaged up 2 add-on bundles:
- Content Keyword Analysis, with recommended SEO strategy
- Security assessment -- detailed review of your codebase to determine how much it has been customized, how up-to-date it is, and where there might be challenges working on the site from a security standpoint
Each of these is available as an add-on to our basic Site Appraisal, or get the whole ball-of-wax as a single bundle and save $700!
Website Reach
Here are some of the services we provide that can help your website broaden its reach:
- Keyword Analysis
- Social Media Marketing
- Email marketing
- SEO
- SEM
- Content back-linking
Website Engagement
Website engagement is a combination of content, design, and development -- it's the core of what visitors see on the site. Related services we provide include:
- Content marketing strategy
- Content writing
- Website development
- Basic Business websites
- Site upgrades, and data migration
- E-Commerce development
- Website Analytics
- Polls, Quizzes, Webforms
- Graphs, rich visual displays
- Animations, videos, podcasts
- Lead Capture
- Chat software
Delivery
For lack of a better word, "Delivery" describes all the stuff your website does (or could do) to make your business or organization run better. There are often huge opportunities in this area, and many businesses are completely unaware their website can do these things:
- "CRM" -- Customer relationship management -- track sales opportunities, sales reps, dealers, partners
- Customer/Vendor portals
- Membership management systems
- E-Commerce fulfillment systems, packaging systems
- Event Registrations
- Booking systems
- Reporting systems, visualizations
- Notifications, alerts
- Quote-building systems
- Issue tracking/ticketing systems
- Make custom/general database functionality mobile
- Data migrations, integrations with other systems
- Custom development
- ... and much more!
Security
Security is a cornerstone of what we do. All of our ongoing plans include our "Protection Plan" service to keep your site safe, up-to-date, and well backed up. We also provide:
- Hacked Site recovery
- Security code reviews
- Website Security assessments
- Disaster Recovery Planning
- Backup service
- Regulatory compliance services
- Consulting on privacy issues
- Website updates
- Server updates and monitoring
- PCI Compliance services
- HIPAA Compliance services
- GDPR consulting
- Risk assessment, mitigations, and management
- Configuration Management
Performance
Slow page delivery can decimate the value of your site. With Google penalizing sites that take longer than 6 seconds, and short mobile attention spans, website performance is more important than ever! Our services related to site performance include:
- Performance analysis and assessment
- High-performance server configurations
- Code optimization
- Image optimization
- Scaling strategies
- Load testing
- Memcached, Redis, Varnish, Opcode caching, Reverse Proxy caching, other high-performance systems
- Load Balancing, multi-server deployments
User Experience
Your site is worthless if people can't use it. At its worst, user experience kills the value of your site, functionality you've paid to create goes unused, nothing changes. At its best? Your users are delighted, you gain new loyal customers, your staff morale goes up, and everything works smoothly. Our user experience services include:
- Behavior Driven Design, end-to-end testing of features
- Visual Regression Testing
- Usability Testing
- Accessibility testing and implementation
- Custom Javascript widgets built in React or Vue.js
- Website tours, documentation built into your site
- Subtle animations to guide users towards their goals
- Interface simplification