What to Know Before You Sign a Website Agreement

person using laptop discussing a new website

“We just need a new website.”

We hear this all the time from our clients. Your site feels outdated. It’s slow. Sales doesn’t use it. Or worse, someone casually says, “This doesn’t really reflect the quality of your company.” Suddenly, it jumps to the top of your priority list.

A new website feels like a simple fix, but a website isn’t just a design project. It’s an ongoing system. And if you don’t think through the full lifecycle before you sign an agreement, you can end up with surprise costs, technical headaches, or a site that looks nice but doesn’t actually help your business grow.

After more than a decade of partnering with businesses and organizations (and rebuilding dozens of websites), we’ve seen just about everything. Plugins break. Vendors disappear. Hosting gets confusing. Updates cause crashes. Suddenly, that “simple website project” isn’t so simple anymore.

A Website Isn’t a One-Time Project

It’s easy to think of a website like a brochure. Build it once and move on. In reality, it’s more like a piece of software. 

Your site needs hosting, security monitoring, plugin updates, backups, SEO structure, content updates, and performance optimization. If those responsibilities are split across multiple vendors, things get messy fast.

When something breaks, everyone points fingers. No one owns the problem. That’s not where you want to be. So before you sign a website agreement, take a step back and make sure you’re asking the right questions.

5 Smart Questions to Ask Before You Sign a Website Agreement

Here are the five common questions we encourage our potential clients, family members, or friends (honestly, anyone who wants a new website) to ask before signing an agreement with a vendor: 

1. Who owns the site and the code?

Some platforms lock you into proprietary builders or templates. That can make future changes expensive or impossible. You should have flexibility and control.

But ownership goes beyond flexibility.

Make sure you legally own your website, its design, and its code once it’s paid for. You should have full administrative access to your hosting, domain, CMS, and any connected tools. Your contract should clearly state that you own the website and its assets.

Otherwise, an agency can retain control, and in some cases, hold the site hostage if you decide to leave.

It’s something no one thinks about until it happens to them. Rebuilding from scratch because of a contract oversight is expensive, stressful, and completely avoidable.

Ownership isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

2. Who handles maintenance and updates?

Plugins update constantly. Security threats never stop. If no one is actively managing your site, problems are just waiting to happen.

3. Can this site grow with us?

As your business grows, you’ll add services, launch campaigns, and enter new markets. Your website should scale easily without needing a full rebuild every two years.

4. How will this actually support sales?

Your site shouldn’t just look good. It should help your business development team tell your story, answer questions, and close deals.

5. Who do we call when something goes wrong?

This one matters more than you think. Having one accountable partner can save you time, stress, and money.

A Real-World Example: Crain Construction’s New Website

We recently partnered with Crain Construction on a full website rebuild. Their previous site relied on a third-party template and a stack of plugins. Over the years,  regular updates caused major loading speed issues. One update even took the entire site down for a week. On top of that, the site didn’t reflect the quality of their work. That’s not ideal when your website supports business development and client trust.

So we didn’t just “refresh the design.” We rebuilt the foundation.

We created a custom WordPress site with clean code, better performance, and room to grow. We collaborated closely with their business development team to add practical tools, like dedicated “markets served” pages, that they now use in sales conversations. The result feels stronger, faster, and built for the long haul.

Crain’s new website now reflects the quality of their work and functions as a long-term asset that supports growth, visibility, and trust.

Additional Resources to Take Your Website to the Next Level 

If you’re exploring a website project, these resources can also help:

Green Apple’s Approach: Website Design with the Big Picture in Mind 

At Green Apple, we don’t treat websites like one-off projects. We think about the whole picture: strategy, messaging, design, development, hosting, maintenance, and ongoing marketing. All working together to design a website that actually supports your business goals instead of creating new problems.

And if you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, take a look at our recent work or connect with our team. We’re always happy to talk through your goals and help you plan the right next step.

Because a new website shouldn’t feel risky. It should feel like progress.

How to Know When to Redesign Your Website

A-desk-with-a-monitor-and-a-laptop

Determining when to redesign your website is a common yet challenging business decision. On one hand, your website is often your most important marketing tool. An effective website can make a dramatic impact on your bottom line. On the other hand, redesigning your website requires significant time, effort, and resources. 

At Green Apple, we’ve had the opportunity to help dozens of clients redesign their websites over the years — a few of which have gone through multiple iterations. We want to help our clients make informed decisions on whether they should invest in a website redesign. We also want to help them avoid the mistakes businesses make when launching a new website. Sometimes they decide it’s time to redesign the entire site. In other cases, we help them identify small tweaks and improvements they can make.

How to Know When to Redesign Your Website

Beyond obvious factors such as security concerns or outdated functionality, here are a few questions we ask to help our clients navigate the decision to redesign their website:

1. What do the metrics say?

Google analytics and marketing metrics can play a helpful role in helping you determine the current state of your website. 

For example, If your website has a high bounce rate, you should conduct further investigation to see if the issue is based on slow page load speed, bad or unclear content, or a poor user experience.

Your conversion rate can help you determine if your website is doing its job of converting visitors into potential customers.  Websites that have a hard time generating leads and conversions are typically missing key elements that help with the conversion process.

2. How is the mobile experience?

In today’s digital-first age, mobile marketing is an essential tactic for every business. The majority of web traffic nowadays is conducted on mobile devices. Your website should be “mobile responsive” and also easy to navigate on a phone. If you have received numerous complaints about the mobile optimization of your site, it might be a good idea to get ahead of the issue by redesigning your website.

3. Does your website reflect the way you currently talk about your business?

Most businesses adapt the way they do business in order to keep up with the changing demands of their customers. For some, the way they talk about their business changes as they discover new messaging that resonates with their audience. It’s important that your website matches the way your leadership and sales team talks about your products or services. This is key to creating a cohesive user experience. 

4. How easy is it for people to quickly understand what you do and take the first step?

The ultimate goal of every website is to support business development. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your website is easy to navigate and understand. Having a disconnect at any level of a user’s journey can lead to confusion and frustration.

How do you provide a great experience? Make sure your website is easy to navigate, your content is easy and enjoyable to read, and you have clear calls to action.

5. Are you being outranked by competitors on important key search phrases?

Designing an SEO-friendly website is a foundational element for your marketing efforts. SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible to searchers, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. 

One way to determine if you’re maximizing your SEO efforts is to conduct keyword research to see how you compare with other competitors in your industry. If your website is struggling to rank for important keywords, it’s likely that your website is not built in accordance with new search engine algorithms and needs to be redesigned.

Failing to keep your website updated can waste marketing resources, lose out on sales, or hurt your brand reputation. 

If you’re just looking for a website redesign, Green Apple might not be the best fit. But if you want to ensure your website is aligned with your overall marketing strategy and actively helping you grow your business, we’d love to talk. Through a comprehensive audit of your website, we can discover opportunities to improve your website so that it reaches your audience. Contact our team today.

The 10 Details to Look for When Testing Your New Website

Launching a new website is no small feat. It requires a combination of strategy, creativity, design, and web development skills to execute the hundreds of details required for planning and building it. After hours of preparation and collaboration, the last thing you want is to launch your website without making sure it’s ready for an audience. Testing your new website before it goes live is absolutely essential for a smooth website launch. 

As a full-service marketing agency, we’ve had the opportunity to help launch dozens of websites over the years. Along the way, we’ve learned certain best practices when it comes to completing the final details and testing a website before it launches. 

What to Check When Testing Your New Website

Here are 10 areas of your new website to test and review prior to going live. Within each of these categories, there might be dozens of specific details (e.g. – forms on multiple pages), so it’s important to create a comprehensive checklist that includes all the pages on your new site: 

1. Website Functionality

Making sure your website integrates with your existing systems and third-party websites or plugins is the first priority during a website review. This includes testing all outbound links, internal links, and forms on your website. Making sure your website is fully functional also means checking for HTML and CSS validation to ensure your website is accessible to search engines.  

2. Site Navigation and Content

In addition to checking the back-end functionality of your website, you also want to make sure it’s usable for your audience. This includes testing and verifying navigation features that make your pages easy to use and understand. This is also a time to review your content for any final editing or proofing that might be needed.  

3. User Experience

Creating a compelling user experience is key to attracting potential clients to your website. Before you launch, you want to make sure there aren’t any issues that might impact the experience people have on your site. When checking user experience, seek feedback from several individuals who haven’t worked on the website project. They’ll be able to see the site with new eyes and identify any issues that might arise when a new visitor first encounters the site.

4. Mobile Responsiveness

Making sure your website is optimized for mobile is essential. Responsive web design is a design that fully meets the needs of users and is displayed without any problems on any type of device or browser. The layout should automatically adapt to different sizes and capabilities of various devices. It should also take into account the way people explore websites on their phone through scrolling, touching, and zooming. 

5. Page Loading Speed 

Your website must have a fast page load speed if you want to be optimized for search engines. If the site is slow, it won’t get displayed among the top results. The ideal website load time for mobile sites is 1-2 seconds. 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. 

6. Your CTA Buttons

Your calls-to-action are one of the most important aspects of your website. They help visitors take the next step and inform you that people are interested in your products or services.

It’s important to make sure the CTA buttons on your website integrate with your marketing and sales management systems. In addition, it’s helpful to make sure your CTA buttons are large enough to see, appropriately titled, and optimized to motivate people to take action. 

7. Security

Making sure your website is secure from potential hackers is critical, especially if you have a customer portal that stores any confidential information. Running penetration and vulnerability tests on your website can help you verify that the information system you’ve chosen protects data and maintains functionality as intended.

8. Your Website Backup Strategy

In today’s digital age, you want to have a plan in case your website crashes. Make a concrete plan addressing where you will back up your site, how often you will conduct a backup, and what your implementation plan will look like after launch. 

9. Your Website Metadata

Analyzing your metadata before launch is another way to ensure your website is optimized for search. You want to make sure each page has unique meta descriptions and that your metadata is properly in place for any social media sharing content. All spelling and grammar should also be correct in your metadata to make it properly searchable and indexable. 

10. Your Website is Linked to Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 is one of the most helpful tools we have when it comes to managing your website. Before you launch, it’s important to make sure your website analytics codes have been added, funnels and goals have been added, and all your accounts are synced. If you run any digital advertising campaigns, you’ll want to make sure those accounts are synced as well. 

Let Our Team Handle the Details 

Failing to conduct a final test is one of the most common mistakes businesses make when launching a new website. At Green Apple, we do everything we can to help our clients avoid these pitfalls. If you’re looking for advice or support for designing a new website, our team can help. We’ll work to make sure your website fits within your overall marketing strategy and is built with longevity in mind. Connect with our team today to learn more about our process and share a bit more about what you’re looking for.

5 Ways to Attract Your Ideal Client to Your Website

laptop-on-table-with-Google-search-screen

You have a great website. So, why are people not finding it? If they are coming across your website, why aren’t they staying? Are these visitors even your target audience? These questions may have crossed your mind as you’ve been navigating through your digital marketing strategy. It’s common for businesses to feel like they’re doing everything they can, with little to no result. That’s where we come in. To help you attract your ideal client to your website, we’re sharing five elements of your strategy that can make all the difference. 

1. Know Who They Are (In Detail)

Before you go looking for your ideal client, you must determine who they are. You may feel like you already know, but even if you do, it’s important to delve further into the details. An essential tool for this process is the client profile. By asking yourself deeper questions about who your clients are, you can paint a picture of your client that will guide your marketing decisions moving forward, such as where to advertise your website, for example. Need help coming up with questions? Take a look at our recent article, 20 Questions to Ask Yourself that Will Improve Your Customer Profiles.

2. Speak to Their Current Challenges

Understanding your clients’ pain points—their current challenges—you can speak directly to them, making them feel seen and heard. What keeps them up at night? What is that one thing they need to hear? If you can identify those elements, you can grab your audience’s attention by showing them that you can offer the solution they’ve been searching for. Utilize this messaging throughout your website, social media captions, blog articles, and more to attract the client who needs exactly what you’re selling.

3. Show them the Type of Results You Can Deliver

People are attracted to results, and rightfully so. They want to know that they’re spending their hard-earned money on a service that will deliver the promised results. Show your clients what you’re capable of. Create case studies and curate a portfolio so that your prospects can see what you’ve done for others. This way, they’ll be able to imagine what you could do for them. 

4. Provide an Excellent User Experience

When a prospect visits your website, you want to make sure that their experience is top-notch. This is sometimes their first impression of your business, and therefore should be a tool used to begin solidifying your relationship with this visitor. If they have a tough time navigating the site or aren’t drawn in by it, that might be all they need to know to begin looking at your competitors. 

5. Use SEO Best Practices

If your prospects can’t find your website, all of your effort could go to waste. It’s vital that you implement SEO best practices, such as adding keywords, metadata, and backlinks to your website so that you rank higher in search results. SEO can be a complex element of your digital presence, so it’s often essential to have a marketing team on your side, but there are a few tactics that you can implement yourself. Check out this article for a bit of guidance: 4 Steps Your Small or Midsize Business Can Take to Improve SEO.

Attract Your Ideal Client with Green Apple Strategy

We can help you reach your target audience through a comprehensive set of marketing tactics. Want us to join your team? Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Our team is happy to sit down with you to discuss your goals and how we can help you achieve each and every one of them.

5 Marketing Tips for Information Security Professionals

Information security is a highly technical and fast-paced industry. Its audience members range from technical novices to highly-skilled chief information security officers and other IT professionals. So, how do you speak to both? And, what is the best way to reach these two sides of your target audience? In this article, we’ll share the best ways to connect with your current and potential customers. 

The Most Important Element

When you’re in the information security industry, the most crucial element of marketing is to educate your audience. They are looking for an expert, and by positioning yourself as a thought-leader, you can show them that you are that expert. Especially as security awareness continues to grow and companies understand the weight of a potential security issue, you’ll find that customers will gravitate toward the company they see as most established and knowledgeable. How can you present yourself as both? 

1. Invest in content marketing. 

Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tactics that information security professionals can use to build their brand and position themselves as experts. With content marketing, you achieve multiple goals at once. You educate your audience, improve SEO through targeted keywords, and build informational pieces that can be used in various ways—social media, email marketing, blog articles, and more. This piece of your marketing strategy is integral to your overall success. And, with a well-designed strategy, you can create a platform that speaks to several different segments of your audience. 

2. Educate your audience through webinars and podcasts.

Traditional content creation isn’t the only way to reach your audience. In fact, widening your audience through multiple platforms could be the key to broadening your reach. Your company’s team of experts has insight into a variety of topics that others are searching for online. Webinars and podcasts are the perfect way to get the word out. These platforms not only educate your current and potential customers, but they also allow you to generate leads and boost your brand awareness. 

3. Become a guest on blogs, webinars, and podcasts. 

While creating your own content, you can also connect with other industry professionals and influencers to become a guest contributor on blogs, webinars, and podcasts. This tactic puts you in front of potential customers, positions you as an expert, provides you with content to share on your own channels, and creates backlinks for your website (an important element of your SEO strategy). Being a guest contributor has several of the same marketing benefits as creating your own content. It’s one more way to illustrate to your audience that you can take care of them. 

4. Boost your online presence through local SEO. 

Local SEO efforts are crucial to the success of information security professionals. It’s up to your marketing team to ensure that your company is discoverable in a comprehensive set of ways—your web presence is a significant part of that plan. By focusing on local SEO, you help your audience find you quickly online, showing up in their “near me” search results and increasing your local awareness. Among the many ways to keep your website’s SEO healthy include updating your website consistently as well as updating your Google My Business profile. Your customers want someone local they can trust. Local SEO efforts can position you as that company. 

5. Make your website easy to navigate and include resources. 

When your audience finally lands on your website, keep them there. Make your website easy to navigate with informational resources that will paint a positive picture of your brand. Your website is at the center of your customer experience, and so it’s an integral piece of your marketing puzzle. Ensure that your website is a clear representation of what you do and why you do it while giving your customer several ways to contact you, order your product, or begin using a service. 

Marketing within the information security industry can be a different ballgame—one that is much easier to play with a marketing team that has experience with this particular audience. If you need help boosting your marketing strategy, contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation.