Website Strategy, Design, and Development

Custom sites allow us to control many factors that impact the longevity of your site: overall stability, page-load times, search engine performance, accessibility, and semantic code. And if issues do come up, we can fix them more easily. While the up-front price of a custom site is higher, it’s a better bang for your buck in the long term. Custom sites also allow the most flexibility, helping your brand stand out online.

However, we know that some budgets simply can’t accommodate a fully custom website. In this case, we’ll find the most reliable WordPress themes and page builders to do the job more affordably. These themes are engineered to be one-size-fits-all. They don’t load as quickly as custom sites and the code isn’t streamlined, but you can feel confident a template site will run smoothly for two to three years.

Beyond that, there’s a greater risk your theme will be updated by the third-party developers, which can impact the site design and performance. If your theme becomes incompatible with a plugin, you’ll need to wait for the original developers to fix it. Sites under $20,000 are typically dependent on themes and page builders.

WordPress and Shopify are our go-to platforms for building websites.

We love how WordPress makes it easy for our clients to edit and maintain their websites after handoff. WordPress allows lots of technical customization, including custom forms, calls to action, post types, and plugins.

If you’re looking to sell products on your site, we recommend Shopify. While a WordPress site with Woocomerce can also be a good option, in our opinion, Shopify provides the most reliable platform for serious sellers. There’s a lot of room for customization, and Shopify integrates with in-store POS equipment, streamlining inventory management. Shopify also has excellent reporting capabilities and a built-in email confirmation system.

Both Shopify and WordPress support a wide range of APIs—third-party tools that add functionality to your site.

For emails and newsletters, we recommend Mailchimp and Klaviyo for their easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality. However, we know that sometimes a budget simply can’t accommodate a fully custom website. In this case, we’ll find the most reliable WordPress themes and page builders in order to help us do the job within your budget. These themes are engineered to be one-size-fits-all. They don’t load the fastest and the code isn’t streamlined, but you can feel confident that a template site will run smoothly for three to four years.

Beyond that, the risk goes up that your theme will be updated by its developers, which can impact the design and performance of your site. If your theme becomes incompatible with a plugin, you’ll need to wait on the original developers to fix it. Sites under $15,000 are typically dependent on themes and page builders.

We provide basic SEO work within our base development rate. This includes effective content hierarchy and markup, as well as setup to allow content editors to add and edit meta tags, link titles, and alt text.

If you’re looking for a more strategic SEO plan, we highly recommend working with our SEO partner, Evident, for a thorough audit of industry and organization keywords that will help guide your site content. Evident stays informed of the latest search algorithm updates, they’re thorough and strategic with their research and recommendations, and our teams work together to balance user experience and search engine performance.

It’s becoming increasingly important for websites to meet certain ADA standards. As a best practice, Infantree develops websites that are semantically poised to meet A-level ADA compliance, and we have the tools and knowledge to enhance a site to AA-level ADA compliance with additional time in the budget. We also realize there’s often room for ongoing improvement to your site’s accessibility, and we’re happy to work with you to develop a plan that meets your organization’s goals.

For any website, it all comes down to care and maintenance. Ensuring that core theme files and plugins are regularly updated is crucial to your site’s lifespan. While we don’t provide this maintenance directly, we work with our hosting partner, Anchor Host, to keep your website performing for the long run.

Equally important is keeping your site organized through content hierarchy and strategy. We provide a plan for ensuring content stays organized, preventing your website from becoming cluttered and hard to navigate over time.

Infantree can provide maintenance plans to fit any budget and need. While some clients prefer a maintenance plan that provides a monthly report on analytics, others prefer more in-depth assistance with blog writing and content entry.

If you have a lot of ongoing monthly website needs, we recommend a maintenance retainer. This allows us to work on any number of items at the same time without having to approve a contract on every detail. As things arise, we can quickly and easily address them.

We have a longstanding relationship with Anchor Host, and we highly recommend their hosting services. We prefer Anchor Host because, on top of basic hosting, they provide technical maintenance that is crucial to the health of the site (like keeping plugins and theme files up to date). The benefits provided with their monthly plan include: nightly backups (trust us, these come in handy!), access to premium plugins, technical support, and dedicated development servers. These plans are based on page views and billed every six months.

Absolutely. In fact, we believe websites are most effective when design and content are developed hand in hand. When we write client websites in-house, our designers and writers work closely together to make sure the copy and visuals sync with and strengthen each other.

When anticipating a website build, we’ll map out a plan for content development that fits your needs and budget. Collaborating with your team, we can provide simple proofreading, repurpose and edit relevant sections of your existing site, or draft page outlines to guide your own writers. And of course our copywriters are available to write your site in full, based on thorough interviews with your team.