Businesses are spoiled for choice when it comes to resources to create a website. Between free templates and a huge range of hosting platforms, almost anyone can create a website for their company.
The DIY method seems like the easiest solution, but will it set you up for long-term success? Will your brand stand out against a jungle full of custom, user-approved digital products?
Call us biased, but UX/UI design is well worth the investment because of its ability to bring in users and keep them coming back for more. According to this article from medium.com, UX design has insanely high ROI rates (some as high as 301%)!
Users also agree about the power of UX because it benefits them as much as the business. In fact, 3 out of 5 users agree that a positive user experience is more influential than marketing or advertising.
If you’re interested in seeing how UX design can help your business, but don’t have the resources to create a website yourself, don’t panic! That is where we come in.
Digital agencies like CreateApe have both the services and expertise you need to redesign your digital product or create an all-new website from scratch. Leave your project with us—and we’ll deliver something that your company and your users can be proud of!
CreateApe's Resources to Create a Website
- Research
- UX/UI design
- Website development
- Branding
- Marketing
- Copywriting
- Video
- Digital Products
Benefits of Hiring a UX Agency
We’ve talked ad nauseum about the financial benefits of UX design and how it affects customer satisfaction, so let’s take a step back and look at how an agency improves the product itself.
Free website templates are great for building personal websites or portfolios, but professional companies need something more substantial.
Free website templates usually have restrictions that can negatively impact the business (and the user experience by extension).
The Drawbacks of Free Website Builders
- Page limits
- Limited storage
- Limited features
- No customer support outside contact forms
- No custom domain name
- Advertisements/company branding
Your branding means more to your users than the free website builder’s logo. Competing brand identities on your page can confuse and distract the user. It also just looks less official.
Benefits of a Professionally-Built Site
UX/UI design is so much more than just the website. It covers everything from discovery to new products and features post-launch. It also tells you everything you need to know about your users and how to keep your brand moving forward in the competitive market.
Let’s say you’re a healthcare provider that needs a professional website for patients to book appointments. CreateApe can build as many pages as you need, design appointment portals and insurance features, create a chatbot for customer support, claim an original domain name, and conceptualize a unique brand identity from scratch.
The result is not only a fully-functional website but a more valuable brand and products that set you apart from your competitors.
How CreateApe Builds Sites
CreateApe is a full-service agency, meaning all your resources to create a website are in one place! No matter what stage of development your product is at, we can step in and fill in any gaps you need to get it finished.
Let’s walk through the typical process we take to create a website from the ground up.
Our UX Process
- Jungle Guide:
UX design is heavily reliant on research to understand your industry, your business, and (most importantly) your users. We start each project with a robust research phase so we can bounce ideas off each other and find solutions that work for the users.
If we’re redesigning an existing website, we’ll look at your Google Analytics to understand your website traffic and user behaviors. We also do a HotJar evaluation to see where users are most active or dropping off.
If we’re creating a website from scratch, we skip this phase and move straight to competitive research and user interviews. Research is important for both kinds of projects because the UX design should be built around your data and findings.
Without this research, you have no idea who your users are, what they want, or what drives them away from a website. You also need to understand who you’re up against so you can make your product better. We’re here to help you navigate this process from beginning to end.
The Jungle Guide, CreateApe’s signature UX evaluation, help you ask all the right questions in the discovery phase and lay the groundwork for a perfect product! Read more about CreateApe’s Jungle Guide in our UX Strategy Blog!
- UX/UI Design:
Once we have research and strategy to guide us, we can start building your future site! We start with wireframes, which are like blueprints. We can determine how many pages we’ll need, where content lives, and site navigation.
By creating this primitive structure, we can focus more on creating logical user flows instead of being distracted by aesthetics. A nice hierarchy of information that will help the user quickly accomplish their goals is what we’re after.
That being said…looks are important! Who said you had to sacrifice style for substance and vice versa? Our UI designers take those wireframes and ramp everything up into a high-fidelity mock-up.
We'll take your branding elements and use them to create visuals. For example, where will logos be placed? How will we use your color palette to guide the user through the interface? What sort of icons will we use? Etc.
- Website Development:
Once we finish with the designs, we turn everything over to our full-stack development team. Our front and back-end developers can handle everything from code creation to interaction design to deliver a fully customized digital product.
Whether or not you have a development team on staff, our team can guide you through the development process from beginning to end into whatever framework you choose. Much like our UX/UI process, every solution we create goes through vigorous user testing and QA.
Leave it to us to make sure everything on the user-facing side of your site works as intended. If you’re creating a project from scratch or need to bring someone on to improve the performance of your existing site, CreateApe is your all-in-one web development resource. To read more about hiring a website development team, check out our blog!
- Launch:
Our job isn’t over once we launch your MVP. When you bring us on as your UX partners in crime, it’s just the beginning!
Once your product is in front of your users, we’ll help you perform regular website maintenance to ensure everything is search engine friendly and working like it’s supposed to. This means updating software, fixing broken links, optimizing load speeds, stress tests, updating certificates, plugins, and theme updates.
You’ll also have our full creative team at your disposal depending on your needs. If you need to add a new page, redesign a contact form, create a new product video, or write a conversation-starting blog post, you can call on your friendly team of UX apes and we’ll swing into action!
What can CreateApe Help Me With?
At CreateApe, we’re so much more than just website design. We’re advocates for your users within your business goals. We’ll stop at nothing to find solutions that work for you and your users.
In the spirit of going above and beyond web design, our expertise extends further than UX/UI. Anything creative you can think of to take your site to the next level, we can do it. Our design team is staffed by wizards in their field that can take your ideas from concept to reality.
When you hire CreateApe for a project, you have all these resources to create a website at your disposal.
CreateApe's Services
- UX Research - Understanding your competitive market, your users, and their nuances.
- UX Design - Building end-to-end flows that help users and business owners accomplish their goals.
- UI Design - Designing visuals to boost the brand’s identity and strengthen the user experience.
- Website Development - Creating highly-customized code for your product across multiple devices.
- Branding - Conceptualizing a unique personality and visual identity to set you apart from your competitors.
- Marketing - Promoting your brand and digital products with personalized campaigns and collateral.
- Video - Telling your brand's story by scripting, animating, and editing video content.
- Copywriting - Communicating on your behalf by developing a unique voice and tone to guide your users.
- Digital Products - Whether you need a website, app, ebook, or landing page, our apes can make your vision a reality.
So, How Do I Build My Perfect Site?
There’s an abundance of resources to create a website available to you, but will they really give you the results you’re looking for?
If you have an idea for a digital product or a clear business goal, a UX design agency (*cough* like CreateApe *cough*) can help you figure out those pivotal first steps to get off the ground. We’ll help you figure out exactly what you need to reach your goals and connect you with the resources to get you there.
So, whether you need a fully-customized product, strategy, or specialist to help create your website, drop us a line!
Still not sure about starting your project with CreateApe? Check out our UX/UI design case studies to hear our success stories.
