Professional Websites for Your Business
A website needs to be well designed and rich with information and imagery. Not only that, it needs to be easy to use and easy to find too.
Honeycomb Creative has designed and developed many professional websites for businesses in a range of industries – including construction, manufacturing, mining and more. They’re all unique and effective for their individual objectives, because we always start with having a full understanding of the core issues. A well-planned website is an effective website.
Our web projects are completed to the highest standards in design and technologies. We give our clients exactly what they need and nothing they don’t, unlike pre-packaged software that may be full of unnecessary features.
We provide our clients with the tools they need to connect with their customers, manage their content, and handle their website registrations or transactions. Our goal is to empower our clients to manage their own websites as much as they wish.
Website Design & Development
Website Design
Responsive Web Design Programming
Responsive web design programming is website design that adjusts to fit on desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers. Responsive websites are designed with additional templates for vertical layouts (smartphones and tablets) and content is ‘adjusted’ and/or ‘hidden’ to fit smaller screen sizes.
Every website built since 2015 is created with responsive design standards to ensure it meets Google’s requirements for ‘mobile friendly’.
High Resolution that’s Retina-ready
Even though the average screen size is decreasing as mobile devices are taking over online browsing, the screen resolution of all screens is continually rising.
Without high-resolution logos and website graphics, your website will look blurry and low quality. That’s why we optimize your website for high-resolution retina display with vector graphic formats, to keep your website and brand looking its best.
Web Browser Compatibility
Your website visitors use a variety of different web browsers to view your site, and your website needs to be compatible with as many of those as possible. With several browsers for desktops and mobile, including previous versions of browsers still being used, there are many different ways your website’s code will be interpreted and displayed.
We always use a testing phase to demo our web projects in common browsers and devices, making sure it functions well and looks amazing across the board.
Fast Websites
People are accustomed to high-speed internet, so the time it takes for your website to load is crucial to keeping visitors from bouncing. If a site takes more than a couple seconds to load, a visitor becomes impatient or assumes the website is broken and clicks away.
We build our websites for speed – from optimized code and graphics to business class web hosting optimized for speed. Our goal is a website that loads as quickly as possible.
Content Management (CMS)
Content Management for Websites
Every client wants to be able to edit their website content. This is easily done using a database driven content management system (CMS). Over the years, we have tested and used various applications; Drupal, Joomla, b2, and others that no longer exist, all the while learning what makes a reliable and easy-to-use content management system.
WordPress
Although we are firm believers in custom programming, in 2012 we began a transition to using WordPress, an open-source CMS platform, for the majority of our custom website development. WordPress has a reputation among clients as being “easy to use” and “easy to update”. The benefits of WordPress are that it allows us to build websites faster, and therefore at a lower cost. WordPress has the largest share of the CMS market which continues to fuel its ongoing growth and development.
Developers are always wary of anything that they have not coded, but in our opinion, WordPress has evolved into a strong development platform that can be leveraged with additional programming. The downside is that every WordPress website requires continual care and maintenance, including technical and security updates to both its core source code and plug-ins.
Our custom installation of WordPress includes numerous customized security settings and client “friendly” personalizations. To make WordPress a proper business platform sometimes require ‘custom plug-in’ development to ensure that websites meet client needs and expectations.
Custom Web Programming
We provide custom programming options for every website that we build. This is what makes our websites different. They’re built specifically to address your business needs.
Much of the custom programming that we create is for ‘back-end’ functions. Some of these functions make it easy for our clients to update their website and others make it easy for clients to retrieve information collected by or stored on the website.
So, in a few clicks, a salesperson could upload a new product sheet, a wholesaler could update a distributors list, an investor relations manager could export a list of newsletter subscribers, or a construction company could add images to their project photo gallery.
Because we listen to you before and during the website development process, we develop a deep understanding of your business needs, enabling us to build a custom website that meets these needs.
Content Creation
Engaging Content and Strong Messaging
Now that you have your audience’s attention with the right design, your content has to deliver. A smart content strategy is the ultimate factor in your website’s success.
We put ourselves in the site visitor’s shoes, working with our clients to create quality content that answers visitors’ questions, builds trust, and leads visitors to the call to action.
Effective Calls to Action
We understand that visitors will be at different stages of the buying cycle, so we work with our clients to develop multiple calls to action all throughout the website.
Calls to action may be to contact (phone number, email, contact form), to register, to purchase, to click to another page on the website, and more. Each page should have a well thought out and clear call to action.
The Right Domain Name
A website’s domain name is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Your company’s domain speaks to who you are, and it acts like the front sign to your brand’s online office. We help our clients select the right domain name for their business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about having your website indexed and showing up high in the listings of Google, Bing and other major search engines.
To help your website be search engine friendly, we design and develop every website with baseline SEO best practices.
SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time silver bullet solution. If you want to improve or maintain your search ranking, we recommend signing up for our quarterly marketing programs.
Website Hosting
Business Class Website Hosting
Our business class web hosting service comes with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage for your website, so you never have to worry about going over your limit. Our hosting servers are optimized for database-driven websites, and we are very confident of our super-charged hosting environment.
Optimized Hosting for WordPress
WordPress can be server resource intensive. Our business class hosting servers have been optimized to load WordPress sites faster. With every WordPress implementation, along with extra security plugins, we install ‘cache’ plugins to make your website more responsive. And, for client doing business across North America or around-the-world, we can utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to make sure that websites always load fast regardless of the location of the website visitor.
Data Center Location
Our primary hosting servers are located in a major internet hubs of Toronto, Ontario and Dallas, Texas and are managed 24/7 by a professional hosting company. In addition, all hosted websites are backed up offsite weekly to Amazon Cloud servers so that they can be easily restored to another hosting provider in case of catastrophic infrastructure failure.
We do have access to additional servers located in San Jose, CA, Chicago, IL, New York, NY, London, UK and Singapore for clients.
As a ‘best practice’ we do not host websites and email on the same server.
Website Pricing & Scheduling
Website Pricing
Because no two websites are identical, price ranges are provided for budgeting purposes only. Call us at 604.466.0558 for a free consultation and an accurate estimate, or use our Get a Quote form.
Basic: $4000-$6000
Standard: $6,000-$10,000
Enhanced: $10,000-$15,000+
For budgeting guidelines, a typical business-to-business client will spend $7,500-$8,500 on their website project. Extras such as custom photo galleries, extensive product showcases or special functionality requests, all increase the cost. Every website we build is custom to the specific needs of the client which is why we provide free custom quotes.
Websites that are more consumer-oriented with dozens or hundreds of products that require an extensive product catalog, possibly e-commerce, and enhanced SEO are more likely in the $12,000 to $18,000 range.
Scheduling
How long it takes to complete a website depends upon a number of factors and we discuss these with you during our estimate process. Very small and simple websites can be created in under 4 weeks, but typical business websites can take anywhere from two to four months. All schedules depend upon timely client response.
Let us know if you need your website finished in time for a trade show, event, or other deadline. In most cases, we can work with your schedule and have the website completed in time. We’ve yet to miss a deadline.
Client Satisfaction Guarantee
Never feel stressed or overwhelmed while working with Honeycomb Creative. Your website project is managed by a capable and experienced web development team who will keep you up-to-date on the project’s progress and promise…
- No Hidden Costs
Only pay exactly what you were quoted. No hidden costs or unanticipated extras. - Website Built to Current Website Standards
An editable and easily expandable website that is search engine friendly. - On-time Delivery
An up-and-running website ready when you need it.
Website Care
WordPress Maintenance
We’re very familiar with WordPress and have rescued many WordPress websites abandoned by their original programmers or hosting company.
Let us help you add content, update themes, and make your website more secure through a security audit. Once we’ve fixed your WordPress website problems, you have the option of moving your site to our servers for hosting to ensure it’s always maintained.
Technical & Security Updates
Sooner than later, your website will be hacked. That is why we are vigilant when it comes to website security and try to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to gain access to your website.
There is no fool-proof way to keep hackers out of your site, but our Technical & Security Updates Service will lessen the chance of an attack by keeping your website programming code up-to-date and secure. We strongly recommend our Technical & Security Updates Service for every website we build, and require it for every website that we host.
Social Sharing
We use some social sharing plugins, to allow you to share certain pages of our website on social media. These plugins place cookies so that you can correctly view how many times a page has been shared.