2 Things You Need for Your New York City Web Design

Top web designers in New York City emphasize two major factors when it comes to web design. First, you will want to build out the site for the needs of NYC’s local site and guidelines. Also, they will want to make your site properly developed for mobile usage. 

New Yorkers are constantly on the go. I know, since I am a New Yorker myself. Here are two tips that we think you’ll want to emphasize while designing your web site in New York City.

Design Your Web Site to the Needs of New York City

We’ve explained localization before from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. But you can take these considerations with web design as well, both in New York City and beyond.

One benefit to localizing your website that you might not consider is translation. A number of plugins and add-ons to various sites can help automatically translate your website to the language of the user. User experiences are better in their language of choice.

This is especially important for New York City, where your web design will wind up reaching a much larger melting pot. DreamHost analyzes language localization well in an article they’ve written.

Similarly, you can add maps and local information that can help your site reach the community you fit into. We highly recommend this and something we’ve touched on in other articles. Localization can help you get noticed by search engines.

Make Your NYC Website Mobile-Friendly

How often (pre-COVID, especially) have you found yourself on the go and looking for a place to grab a bite or accomplish a task, only to check your phone for information. If you haven’t built your website for the needs of New York City’s constantly moving population, you’re missing a large target.

Mobile internet usage has surpassed computer usage, and you wouldn’t likely whip out a laptop on the A train.

Designing a mobile-friendly website will usually require making sure that it can convert your existing information to a format more readable by phones. You can check this with the tool Google provides. 

But if your site isn’t already optimized, it isn’t too late to change that. There are a number of steps you can take in order to make your site more user friendly. Here’s where a great web design agency can help.

We cover aspects of web design in much great detail. However, here are the highlights. You’ll want to make sure that the fonts and image sizes all can convert to different sizes. You’ll also want to have the most important information clearly legible at the top of the page. 

There are other considerations that you’ll want to make, and this HostGator article outlines some of them. But overall, make sure that your website can function to its full purpose on a phone as it does a computer.

How Speed Up a Slow Site

There are several things that bog down site speed - themes, images, and header scripts are the major culprits. Any good web design company, like ProStrategix, can help you fix them.

How Fast is Fast Enough

We cover page speed in great detail in our article on Fast, Responsive, & Intuitive sites for superior mobile performance. However, I will summarize. Three second load speed is the upper bound. The best performing sites load in < 1 second.

Themes are Speed Killers

If you read our blog, you realize we are not fans of themes. All themes will need to be fixed if you want to avoid running two sites - one for desktop and one for mobile. We go into great detail while the CMS (content management service) you chose can affect speed.

Themes carry a lot of unnecessary code that slows load times. They can be fixed either by stripping out the excess code or creating a separate mobile experience. Plug-ins can help, but they can only do so much. 

You may think that you are saving yourself time and money using a theme, but there is a hidden cost, which is fast mobile performance.

Image Sizing and Serving

It is easy to get lazy with images. Just uploading one size and letting the theme or backend resize it. This takes time especially for large files. It’s smart to compress your images to the quality that you need. 

Not all images have to be 300 PPI. Some smaller accent images can look great at 72 PPI. It’s about wisely choosing which images on which pages are most important for your graphic design. 

For the most important pages, take the time to size them to fit. It can severely affect your load time if you have large images that need to be resized.

To Summarize…

Here are two things you’ll want to keep in mind when building your web design for New York City:

1. Make sure the localization of your website emphasizes offices in New York. This will include both how it uses language and how it prioritizes New York City on the page.
2. A mobile site is the price of entry. Your marketing strategies and online marketing campaign will miss ½ your audience if you are not mobile ready.