Marijuana Website Design & Development

As we live in the digital age, having a website is an essential for any new business. A website is this century’s phone number with a 24/7 concierge. For a cannabis business, it’s important to consider that modern, cutting-edge web design that becomes the first exposure of your brand. For this reason, your website should be visually appealing, easy to navigate and intuitively designed to produce results.

What a professionally created website can do for your cannabis business

Most business owners give too much importance to the visual aspect of a website, perhaps taking other sites as reference. This is not entirely a wrong approach, but sometimes these references don’t provide the appropriate frame for your kind of business. There are many factors to take into account when building a website since it will not only represent your cannabis business image but also will establish your brand in the huge worldwide market.

Research and Analysis for a cannabis business

Whether you need to develop a website from scratch or work in a previously built site, the first step is research and analysis to set up a plan according to the business needs and objectives. Having in mind the main purpose of your website and the goals you want to achieve will make more clear the right structure for your website and the type of content that should include ensuring best results. For your cannabis business to be successful in the digital market, it’s important to promote your brand and build a reputation in a simple, yet effective way.

Website analysis

Before building a new website we gather all the information related to your business, as well as the specific industry it belongs to. This helps to develop a site with a well-planned structure defined and conducting a full diagnostics on your existing website to determine the improvements that need to be implemented.

Measuring Key Performance Indicators

The analysis of key performance indicators shows the way search engines will index and rank your website based on the relevance of the content. These are the main aspects to take into consideration when analyzing your website to measure visitors’ interest in the content and how they interact with it.

Analyzing conversion factors

Understanding the factors that affect your website’s conversion will help you measure the success of your marketing and advertising efforts. Data alone is not useful if it’s not interpreted correctly. For example, high traffic volume doesn’t necessarily mean more leads or sales, unless you have set the right triggers for specific actions. Websites should have an appropriate automation strategy to generate conversions based on usability data that is more likely to give results.

Analyzing call to action

These triggers are also known as call-to-action, and they are extensively used in website design and development to prompt an immediate response from the user. Call to actions can have the form of a banner, a button or a simple link and their effectiveness will drive visitor’s attention to your conversion goal.

Our approach in designing your cannabis website

Committed to our client’s satisfaction, our ultimate goal is to design and develop a website for your cannabis business that is not just “pretty” but performs splendidly. Your website is your storefront in the ever-growing cyberspace and it has to be not only accessible but also user-friendly to get the ROI you expect. For this reason, we focus on your business goals and work with you to accomplish them, expanding the reach of your business within the cannabis industry.

Conversion Focused Design

Many business owners invest time and money to get a website because they expect it will generate more business and end up disappointed when that investment does not pay for itself. This is the reason why we are so careful in our preliminary stages to develop a strategy that meets your objectives. Our website design starts with an efficient structure to help visitors navigate easier through the pages that will lead them to a specific action within the site.

Branding

A great brand awareness strategy needs a website design that has a direct impact on your business’ revenue. Creating brand awareness requires more than just exposure to improve with past, current, and future customers. It’s a combination of audience segmentation, appropriate advertisement placement and social engagement for measuring your efforts results.

Creating Mock – ups

Website design’s most challenging aspect is to balance appearance and functionality, and good designers know that behind every decision there’s a business objective. Having a mock-up of a site before the first line of code may seem an extra step in your process, but it’s actually quite helpful to manage expectations and to provide developers with a visual aid to their task.

Client Approval

When it comes to customer satisfaction sometimes is more important what a client expects to receive than the actual result. As we highly value our customer opinion, we work hard to maintain high standards in every project, and submit our website design to client’s approval before going live. Also, we are fully aware of how an overlooked detail can impact your business, therefore we run several quality assurance check-ups and request final approval previous to launch.

How we develop the code for your cannabis website

After clearing previous stages, it is time to put all the planning and design into work, developing your website in the right platform according to your business needs. One of the most frequent questions our clients ask is how WordPress web design compares to a static HTML website. Options for developing sites have been evolving and growing in the last few years, each with a set of features that benefit some businesses more than others. WordPress has become one of the most popular CMS for web development and there might be good reasons for that.

HTML vs WordPress

Even if you’re not a technology expert, you have certainly heard about HTML code at least once. HTML is a computer language basic for all websites and almost all the content on the Internet. Developing a website using static HTML has many advantages that can make a website more efficient for a cannabis business or related products. However, it requires advanced coding skills to deliver deeper levels of customization.

On the other hand, WordPress has emerged as the preferred content management platform, offering a dynamic, user-friendly interface that generates the standard HTML code almost by itself. WordPress has become so simple yet effective, that a website can be developed with a basic coding knowledge and still can be top-notch in design and SEO friendly.

Pros and Cons of a Content Management System

A CMS, namely Content Management System, is a powerful tool with perks –and some hindrances, that can affect a website’s performance if not set up appropriately. In this case, WordPress is one of the most popular for its main features:

• Flexibility: content in WordPress is easy to update, even for beginners.
• Usability: its intuitive interface makes it easy to use for developers, designers, and users as well.
• Scalability: countless applications to enhance site functionality and optimization.

Mobile Responsive Design

A Responsive web design is a setup that changes the way every device interprets the same HTML code, using other code sources to adjust the appearance of the page on each screen. As you may know, conversion rate is one of the Key Performance Indicators to gauge the effectiveness of marketing efforts. According to a recent Google analysis, 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile. So it is wise to say that a responsive web design has a positive impact on your clients’ engagement with your business.

Development of Website Functionality using Javascript and PHP

In order to create an award-winning website, developers must know and use multiple coding languages, not only to customize its functionality but to improve overall website’s performance. PHP and Javascript are the two ideal complements for website development, as they both have different purposes to enhance its capabilities. While PHP is a server-side code that allows integrations with databases, Javascript is a client-side programming language used mostly for creating network-centric applications.

API integration

Since data is one of the most valuable assets for companies in this era, it’s also very hard to deal with, especially when it’s all scattered. Through API Integration all data is pulled from external systems and applications, and connected to a website to manage and consolidate the information effectively and securely. When 72% of major IT projects have issues with data reliability, companies spend billions per year just integrating their systems to reduce margin losses.

Website Security

The most secure websites are developed with security in mind from the start. Regardless the preferred platform to build our customers websites, security is a challenge especially when you need to keep it balanced with usability without compromising either. During our website development, we analyze potential vulnerabilities and design an effective security architecture to prevent any threat, both at the platform and server level. Our website security practices ensure the implementation of the security measures needed, but also how to create a solid site structure that makes your website both usable and secure.

HTTP vs HTTPS

One of the most common questions about website security is the difference between these two acronyms. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and as its name suggests, it is used for transferring data. The S in the latter indicates a security layer added to the protocol based on data encryption through an SSL certificate.

Implementation of SSL

Setting up an SSL certificate for a small website is a simple and straightforward process. Larger websites may require a more rigorous configuration to avoid any data unsecured during the transfer, which is critical for sites that handle sensitive information.

An SSL certificate provides an encrypted connection between the server hosting the website and the browser from the user’s end, improving not only security but also trust in your website. According to a recent research, more than 80 percent of participant users would leave the site before making a purchase if there was no security in use.

Quality Testing

The last frontier for any project is the quality assurance, and for website development, this is not an exception. A high quality website integrates effectively the sum of all its parts not only to achieve your goals but also to help your potential and current customers reach theirs.

At the end of the day, even the most experienced and careful website developer is just human and can overlook a detail or two from time to time. From complicated surgeries to rocket launches, every process that involves different complex stages needs to be have a quality testing to ensure everything is in place. This includes but is not limited to the following

HTML Validation

Since there are different internet browsers and every one of them has a specific way to interpret code, the HTML validation checks that each page has declared the standard to which it adheres to ensure the website displays uniformly in all environments. Validating HTML helps to identify wrong markups to avoid that your website code produces an outcome different from what it has been intended, or even not being recognized anymore.

Javascript is Error Free

Like the HTML code, Javascript also needs to be reviewed carefully in order to maintain your website’s database clean with correct and useful data. Validation can be done and deployed in several ways. Whether from the server side, performed after input data has reached the server or from the user side, on a web browser before the information is sent to the database.

All images have correct licenses

All pages have content

Before the launch of your website, and after putting so much effort into creating the right content for it, we have to make sure that all of the pages you need for your online opening are in place. Also, it is important to double check that your content has proper spelling and grammar. Just imagine having a bunch of spelling errors all over your website. That will send a message to your customer that you don’t  pay attention to detail and may affect your business reputation.

Pages are optimized for SEO

After proofreading your content for humans, it’s also necessary to check its SEO efficiency. This means reviewing targeted keywords density and location, text formatting, anchor text and alt attributes. These elements should be consistent in each page’s code throughout the site. Also, it’s important to ensure that the heading tags contain the appropriate page title, meta description and other related keywords.

Your Cannabis Website is ready to go live!

Your website is your dedicated customer service platform to provide potential and current clients with a way to connect with your brand, and therefore your business’ products and services.

In order to improve the customer experience, your website should present to your audience the most relevant information about the business but also be swift and actionable to ensure the ROI. Our web design is a strong combination of expert development and thoughtful design that not only captivates users but also delivers optimal functionality and high conversion rates.