Digital marketing in Kansas City.
Digital Marketing
Kansas City
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Top 1% Global Leader Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2023
Top 1% Digital Agency in United States
Ranked by UpCity 2022
Fastest-Growing Companies in the USA
4 Years in a Row
Top 1% Best Digital Marketing Award
Ranked by Expertise 2023
#2 Global Award Winner
Ranked by MASHABLE
Top 1% Award of Excellence Winner
Years 2020, 2021, 2022
500+ 5-Star Reviews in Google
Ranked by Our Customers
Top 1000 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2022
#1 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Business Journal
Top Rated SEO Agency
Ranked by SEO Blog 2023
Top Ecommerce Development Company
Ranked by Selected Firms
Top Web Development Agency
Ranked by Design Rush
Top 1% Global Leader Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2023
Top 1% Digital Agency in United States
Ranked by UpCity 2022
Fastest-Growing Companies in the USA
4 Years in a Row
Top 1% Best Digital Marketing Award
Ranked by Expertise 2023
#2 Global Award Winner
Ranked by MASHABLE
Top 1% Award of Excellence Winner
Years 2020, 2021, 2022
500+ 5-Star Reviews in Google
Ranked by Our Customers
Top 1000 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2022
#1 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Business Journal
Top Rated SEO Agency
Ranked by SEO Blog 2023
Top Ecommerce Development Company
Ranked by Selected Firms
Top Web Development Agency
Ranked by Design Rush
Web Design in Kansas City
Facing every challenge together with NEWMEDIA.
Internet marketing is an increasingly complex phenomenon in modern business. It includes numerous professional branches like web development, search engine optimization, lead generation, paid services like Google ads, and, of course, web design. While the individual internet marketing services may sound familiar, there’s one thing customers rarely consider:
All facets of digital marketing play into each other.
In other words, email marketing is connected to content marketing in general. Social media marketing may be connected with both. Furthermore, organic and paid strategies often work in concert to bring optimal results. But most importantly, all this leads to one central location where your marketing campaigns really pay off: your website.
This is where web design and development become essential. You might have the best search engine optimization in place and your ads could be tailored to target the most promising audience possible. But if all those clicks and search engine results go back to a poorly made website, no amount of lead generation will turn out the desired results.
In fact, web design can have an absolutely massive impact on your digital marketing campaign. More than conversion optimization, the design could improve your site’s rating with search engines, making it easier to reach your target audience. The right website design can boost your general and local SEO to an extent that would otherwise be unimaginable.
But what is web design precisely and how does it affect other marketing techniques like search engine optimization? You’ll have to keep reading to find out, as we examine the history of web design, the main tasks of web designers, and the relationship between website design and SEO. But first, let’s address a specific topic: Why you need a local Kansas City web design agency and why NEWMEDIA is the best choice for just that.
The primary reason for a local agency is that you need tailored Kansas City SEO, which differs from the general variety in that it provides much more accurate results, helping you get to the audience most likely to do business with you. Local businesses find most of their customers through this type of search engine optimization. How many customers? Check out this simple stat:
Finances Online has gathered this statistic (originally measured by Blue Square Management) along with several others that are equally as impressive. For instance, the same source reports that more than half of online searches result in a store visit if the search contains the term “near me.” To boil it down to a simple fact, local search engine optimization matters, and a lot.
So you need localized Kansas City SEO. But you’re wondering what that has to do with web design and how NEWMEDIA can help. The answer is straightforward: NEWMEDIA has the experience and expertise in the field, as well as the reputation to back it up. We specialize in all aspects of digital marketing and know how to create SEO-friendly websites to match your exact business goals.
If you’re curious to understand precisely how a Kansas City web design agency can boost your search engine optimization and other digital marketing efforts, keep reading as we break down the subject, starting with a brief history of web design.
Kansas City website design, UX, digital development and marketing agency
INCREDIBLE PRODUCT MEETS IMPECCABLE DESIGN
Top 1%
Global Leader Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2023
Top 1%
Digital Agency in United States
Ranked by UpCity 2022
NEWMEDIA.COM
Web Design | SEO+Social Digital Marketing Agency
We can craft the perfect digital strategy to grow your business, and then execute it for you to generate massive scale. And we can move much faster than you would expect.
A History
of Web Design
It should come as no surprise that web design is as old as the craft of creating websites. Practically as soon as the first lines of website coding went online, early experts have looked for ways to make the content more appealing and new websites more optimized. In that regard, website development and design went hand in hand.
Here's how graphic design in websites developed over the past three decades:
Early Days - 1980s
The beginnings of the internet in the late 80s didn’t have much to offer regarding graphic design. In fact, the way early web pages looked was more a matter of necessity than intentional application of a particular aesthetic. Yet, this doesn’t mean the forerunners of modern web designers weren’t already active back then.
Still, the means of early web design were quite limited. The most that a web designer could work with was a black background, differently colored pixels, and blocky symbols. Interestingly enough, many graphic designers today look back to this aesthetic with nostalgia, often paying it homage in their works.
World's Firsts - 1991 to 1995
The early to mid-nineties were the time of numerous firsts, both in terms of the internet and website design. In 1991, the first HTML web page went online, courtesy of the team at CERN. While the page was nothing more than organized text, this represented the starting point for website development and design.
The following year, the internet saw its first photo. Funnily enough, the image was most akin to an early meme: a fake promotional photo for the parody band Les Horribles Cernettes. While it’s difficult to imagine today’s web design without images, this 1992 example was what started the wave of browser optimization for content that went beyond mere text.
It didn’t take long for the world to realize the internet’s marketing potential. In 1994, web development entered a new era of pages with clickable banners, and this type of website design turned out to be an instant hit. The very first banner ad, courtesy of AT&T, had an impressive 44% clickthrough rate – something that most modern banners couldn’t hope to achieve. Another milestone event took place the same year: the formation of Geocities. This web hosting platform allowed users to design their home pages without extensive coding knowledge. While early adopters had little more to work with than some creative backgrounds, text formatting, and pixel art, it’s clear how this platform was a forerunner to modern DIY variants like WordPress websites.
Once websites with images, banners, text, and other rudimentary elements became prevalent, the initial groundbreaking steps were taken. The time came for new tools to be developed to drive web design further.
Javascript, Flash, and CSS - Late 1990s
The latter half of the ’90s saw a revolution in ways to build websites and structure website content. Ramping up web development and design, these novel tools also drove the popularity of the internet to an unprecedented scale. The following chart from Our World in Data shows this impact the best:
From 1994 to the end of the century, the number of internet users grew nearly 10 times. The late ’90s saw the rise of many modern giants, including Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Google, and Alibaba, and this impressive growth started with one of the crucial programming languages: Javascript.
Javascript changed the face of the internet forever. The language made interactive web design possible, giving the world of web development a whole new arsenal of tools. With Javascript, websites could feature interactivity on a yet-unseen level, like embedded forms and drop-down menus. In other words, accessing certain functionality no longer required a visit to a different page.
The web design revolution continued in 1996 with the introduction of FutureSplash – you likely know it under its more popular name Adobe Flash. This tech opened up website structure to multimedia, giving every web designer the opportunity to utilize video, audio, and animated GIFs. While this sounds downright futuristic for the era, Flash came with a significant downside: Every user needed to have it installed to view the content as intended.
This era of web development and design culminated in software that (finally) separated the HTML content from the visuals. The software in question was CSS, and it made web design more flexible than ever. As a result, web development was ready to start moving forward in massive leaps.
An Expanding Landscape - 2000s
WordPress web design may seem a staple of contemporary web design, but the blogging platform had its beginnings all the way back in the early 2000s. It was the first widespread blogging platform ever. Starting from modest roots in 2003, WordPress only took two years before introducing themes and customization plugins.
Only a year after the launch of WordPress, the world saw another groundbreaking event in web development: MySpace, the first widespread social network. While MySpace had a pivotal role in the rise of social media, it had two other critical impacts on web design: the incorporation of code into web pages and the early beginnings of social media marketing.
The final major development of the decade came not with software but with a famed hardware product – the first iPhone. Launched in 2007, the smartphone allowed users to browse the internet on pocket devices. Needless to say, this milestone ushered in a new era of graphic design, digital marketing, and related creative services.
Modern Web Design - 2010 to Today
Although most of the new ground was already broken by 2010, the new decade was when the internet started really picking up. Wonder how much? Here’s a graph from Statista showing just that:
As you can see, the early 2010s marked the first time websites started numbering in the billions. More importantly, website traffic increased, and the design became increasingly complex. Sites became more responsive, and web design started playing a much greater role in marketing.
Particularly thanks to Google indexing websites according to numerous factors, SEO-friendly web design became a staple of the industry. Today, web design agencies have more on their plates than mere aesthetics. This brings us to the next vital point: the nature of modern web design and the role of graphic design in today’s marketing.
What Do Web Designers Do?
As you’ve probably understood by now, a digital agency and its designers have plenty of responsibilities toward their clients. The best web design company will also be your marketing agency and hire top web designers who can get the job done precisely as you want it.
Let’s delve deeper into what web design is today and what precisely designers do.
An Explanation of Web Design
In general terms, web design deals with front-end website development, particularly the page appearance and overall aesthetics. This is the part of the website that visitors actually see, and it’s the piece that generates user engagement. The above description already implies the importance of custom website design and its potential to convert online leads and make your web presence more engaging.
When building a new website or doing a website redesign, professionals will choose each individual element, including images, logo design, fonts, buttons, banners, and anything else that falls under the site’s visuals.
Main Tasks of Web Designers
The primary task of a designer is, of course, to create, select, and organize the site’s visuals. This can be done entirely from scratch or with the help of sitemaps or specific wireframes. The key responsibilities of a designer in this regard are to make the website aesthetically appealing and optimized from a communication standpoint.
One of the first tasks that a digital agency professional will have here will be to create a page mockup. This is a visual representation of the page’s final look, usually done well in advance of the actual design work. It’s meant to serve as an illustration of the website for the client and an orientation point for the designer.
If the website contains plenty of images, a designer will also have the task of editing them to fit the overall layout. Additionally, these images and other elements will need to be formatted for testing and publishing purposes, which will also be the designer’s task. The prepared page elements will need to be ready for exporting so that developers can embed them into the page code when needed.
Today, one of the most important tasks of a designer enters the territory of functionality. Namely, every new website needs to be optimized for mobile, as well as feature the already mentioned SEO-friendly web design. We’ll expand on that subject after we describe the key skills that the best web designers must possess.
Essential Skills Web Designers Must Have
Web design requires creativity, but it’s also a very technical branch. For that reason, designers need to have specific skills, some of which can make their job easier, while others will be absolutely essential. To illustrate why certain skills are deemed essential, check out this graph:
The statistical breakdown by GoodFirms illustrates the main reasons why visitors leave websites. Factors directly tied to design have a massive impact, while functionality issues are by far in the lead. Designers can influence these factors, too, which only adds to the necessary skills.
Expert Graphic Design
Naturally, the elementary thing that a designer needs to know is – how to design. This skill relies on the professional’s sense of aesthetics, but that’s far from its only component. A designer must know the optimal methods of selecting and combining individual elements to make the website appealing, engaging, and seamlessly functional.
Likewise, a designer should have a grasp of the history of graphic design with a particular understanding of current, outdated, and evergreen trends. Finally, abiding by the core rules and principles of design will be vital.
Web Design Software Proficiency
Design software represents one of the crucial tools of the trade for every designer. Pre-made elements will only suffice for basic design, but a professional job will call for expertise with software like Photoshop or Sketch to get tailored results.
Solid Grasp of the Industry
To give the client precisely what they need, a designer should be familiar with the leading practices in the design industry. Why? Designing a website doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, it depends on the particular practices that are prevalent at the exact moment in the market.
Designers will employ specific techniques to achieve the desired effect, not only aesthetically, but also in terms of marketing. This means that disregarding those techniques will usually result in a site that doesn’t perform as well and ultimately falls behind the competition.
Understanding of Web Development
Lastly, a designer needs to know quite a bit about web development. This isn’t because a designer needs to do actual development work. Rather, it’s because knowing the details of how a website works in the back end can help with better content optimization, leading to a highly functional site.
The Connection Between Web Design and Search Engine Optimization
We’ve touched upon the role web design can play in search engine optimization. Let’s delve deeper into what it means to have an SEO-friendly web design and how design digital agencies can improve SEO services.
Trust-Building
Although it’s not a perfectly quantifiable metric, trust plays a massive role in site ranking. The ability of your website to generate trust will reflect on several measurable factors like bounce rates and reviews, both of which impact search engine optimization.
A well-built, functional, and visually pleasing website will help you build trust with visitors and potential customers. As a result, the site will likely get a more favorable ranking with Google and other leading search engines.
Designing for Speed
If you’d say that speed is everything when it comes to website performance, you wouldn’t be far from the truth. Just check out this graph from Pingdom:
The graph tells a simple tale: Build a website that takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, and your bounce rates will skyrocket. Naturally, nobody wants that simply due to wasted conversion opportunities. However, the problems caused by slow site loading go beyond that.
How fast your site loads has a direct impact on ratings. This impact is further increased when you account for the increasing number of visitors leaving your website within the first five seconds. The ultimate result: almost non-existent conversions and an abysmal ranking. That’s more than enough to show how much design can impact search engine optimization.
Optimizing for Mobile Devices
Modern SEO is largely geared towards mobile, which is no wonder given how many people browse the internet primarily through their smartphones. Mobile optimization falls under the basic SEO services, so it’s no wonder that designing your website with mobile in mind will also boost search engine optimization.
Including Sitemaps
SEO experts everywhere will tell you that creating a sitemap represents one of the best SEO moves you could make. The reason is simple: web crawlers.
Google and other search engines use so-called crawlers to inspect the content of a website. While they can do so with ease on a smaller site, scanning a massive website will be much faster and easier if you include a sitemap. More importantly, search engines will understand that your pages represent a crucial part of your site. So, if you want to make your website Google-friendly, creating a sitemap will always be an excellent choice.
Our Past Projects
Our Esteemed Clientele
Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of clients of all sizes from a range of industries for website designing and redesigning projects. Some of our clients include:
Delta Sky Club
The new Delta Sky Club website portal, designed and developed from scratch by NEWMEDIA, allows Delta passengers who go online in any of their Sky Club lounges across the U.S. to quickly get news, weather & stock market information, in addition to tracking flights on any airline (not just Delta!), searching directly in Google, and getting maps and driving directions to/from any address on Earth.
California Almonds
NEWMEDIA Los Angeles, in collaboration with Sterling-Rice Group (SRG), built a new website for the Almond Board of California under an aggressive development timeline. We built a multi-language website for them while ensuring a consistent user experience by bringing all four existing websites into a single universal system. Our team of experts delivered this mammoth project even after the deadline was shortened by four weeks.
Six Flags
The Six Flags team reached out to NEWMEDIA for a complete website redesign and multi-site ecommerce web development. We redesigned the website to change its complete look and feel and organized content into categories and subcategories to simplify content discovery for visitors. Over the course of the project, we worked in close coordination with the Six Flags team to deliver the website quickly before their parks reopened.
PostNet
PostNet approached us to completely redesign all their websites, including those of franchisees. We developed a fresh responsive website for them to offer a consistent browsing experience to visitors irrespective of the screen size of the device they use to access the website. Additionally, we developed a tool to help visitors find their nearest PostNet center. Finally, we designed the 300+ franchise websites for them with local SEO and franchise SEO.
YMCA (The Y)
YMCA (now “The Y”) is an organization that we’ve all heard of and/or been a part of at one time in our lives. YMCA of Metro Denver came to us for a fresh website design that would communicate their mission of being for youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility. Even more exciting, they had just had a brand refresh and this was the chance to support that refresh with a complementary website.
Haystack
When CBS Television was producing the show that came to be called Haystack Help, they needed a complex yet easy to use website application to direct the TV viewers to visit, and their search for a Denver website developer led them to NEWMEDIA. Initially, prior to contacting NEWMEDIA, they had selected another web development partner for the project. Then, there was a problem…
NEWMEDIA.COM
Choose NEWMEDIA as Your Kansas City Marketing Agency
NEWMEDIA is an expert agency with experience in various industries, from small e-commerce and not-for-profit organizations to healthcare marketing. Our successful campaigns brought wide recognition and awards, including the Mashable Global Award and the U.S. Nationa Excellence Award in 2022. Now, your Kansas City company can reap all the benefits of working with a leading marketing agency. Let us take care of your marketing, web design, and all other business needs.
But don’t just take our word for it
Our Recognitions Speak for Themselves
Upcity
ranks NEWMEDIA a Top 1% Digital Agency in the United States
Clutch
ranks NEWMEDIA a Top 1% Global Leader Digital Agency.
Mashable
ranked NEWMEDIA's work the #2 Global Award Winner (and they ranked Twitter #3).
The Inc. 5000
ranks NEWMEDIA among its fastest-growing companies, 4 years in a row.
Don't be confused by the many imitators, with names that look and sound alike - there is only one, original NEWMEDIA.COM - helping clients grow their businesses since 1996.
Give us a call today or visit us online, at NEWMEDIA.COM. Better yet, we invite you to come and meet with us for a no-obligation consultation about your project. While it’s certainly not mandatory, we believe that the one of the best ways to determine how well we can work with you as your partner is by meeting with us in person. We’ve also got guaranteed PPC and social media marketing plans. We’re being honest, really! In a nutshell, you can rely on us for all things digital, from web design to marketing.
Our expert team has designed, developed, deployed, hosted, marketed and managed 4000+ social media accounts, PPC and SEO campaigns, websites, mobile apps and software applications for clients of all shapes and sizes, including small- and medium-sized businesses, Enterprise organizations, State and Federal government, leading universities, international corporations, major brand name advertising agencies, local and global non-profits, and start-ups of practically every description.
A SAMPLE OF OUR
DIGITAL SERVICES
NEWMEDIA
Your Kansas City Web Design Company
Being able to generate leads is a key aspect of building a large or small business fast. Your website can help a lot in that regard, but only if it embodies the best SEO practices. As you’ve seen so far, design will be vital for just that, and NEWMEDIA has the ultimate solutions to boost your search engine optimization.
With numerous industry leaders as our clients and hundreds of top reviews online, we can say with confidence that our services are next to no other. When you start working with NEWMEDIA, you’ll have our entire team of design, development, and SEO experts at your disposal. Best of all, we offer the best SEO services locally, which means you can get in touch with us right in Kansas City.
Are you ready to engage with your dedicated KC web specialists? If so, give us a call at (816) 704-7120 or drop by our office at 111 W. 10th Street and let a truly terrific company help your small business rise to the top.