City of LA Web Design

Who is the best web design company in Los Angeles?

We are!

But we won’t ask you to take our word for it. We’d like present our case and explain why we deserve (and have earned) the title of the Best Web Design Company in Los Angeles.

Determining who is best at anything requires some sort of fair, unbiased method of evaluation. Since our services are primarily intended for use by businesses in the promotion and marketing of products, services, or content, the easiest method to evaluate success and compare is return on investment. For those of you who don’t know how ROI is determined, its gain from investment minus cost of investment divided by cost of investment.

So we know how we’ll measure who the best web design firm in Los Angeles is, but what does it mean to our clients.

Let’s start with costs. Are we the cheapest web design company out there? No. Are we close? Nope. Do we want to be? No. Most cheap web designers in LA have a lot of additional costs that are not published and that aren’t immediately factored into the bottom line.

What are some of those?

  1. Reliability- A website for $299 is a great deal, only if its going to last the same amount of period that a custom built more expensive one is going to. Sadly, these cheap website designs are all templated. And I do mean all. The designer(s) may say they are custom all they want, but they’re lying. Because these sites templates are specifically built to have very low time investments, they’re built with a very strict set of functions and rules. As software (like the browser that you read this blog post in) or server software (the software you don’t see that outputs these results) changes, those templates began to break down, until the functions and aesthetics don’t do what they’re supposed to do any longer.
  2. Security- This is a huge one that can mean significant fines from the government ($20,000+), equally large fines from your merchant services provider, and potentially civil lawsuits. There have been numerous well known, and highly published scams run on templated sites. How do they work? The most common is this: An overseas web development company makes a nice looking template and provides it for free download on the web. An enterprising web designer or someone who wants to pretend to be a web designer in the US downloads the template(s), and puts up an ad on Craigslist. $99 Websites! Satisfaction Guaranteed! USA, etc. often headline their claims. An unsuspecting or uneducated business person calls, and signs up for a website. What’s the worst that could happen? Its just $99 bucks! But then, six months after they’ve started using the site, they get a call from a client. Their email inbox is filled with spam offering cheap Viagra alternatives, hair growth products, false watches, etc. Then they get a few more calls from clients claiming the same thing. The only thing they have in common? That businesses website. Now a lot of clients are pissed and won’t work with that company again. Did the website cost $99? Nope. The website cost the business all of the revenue that those clients may have generated. Whoops.In another example, the user database is built compromised, with a security flaw already hard coded into it. Once your Joomla, or Drupal, or ecommerce site is live, the original web development company has access to all of your clients’ data. Because your ‘web designer’ (and we do use the term loosely) didn’t know what to look for, that cheap template he used for you is now a huge security threat. You may not know it till your merchant services provider stops doing business with you and tells you you’re being investigated for credit card theft. Of course, they pass the info along to the relevant law enforcement parties. Eventually, they’ll find that you didn’t know about it, but once that’s done, the fines come rolling in. As a website owner, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR CUSTOMER’S INFORMATION. That $99 website suddenly has a cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, and it may be the end of your business.
  3. Functionality- Templated sites just do not offer the same functionality. They offer very simplified, very unsecure versions of the same functionality offered by a custom web developer like us. But because that functionality is usually based on outdated software, and because it was built for older browsers, servers, etc, it begins to break down more quickly. Clients also see that your website just doesn’t work the way its supposed to, or the way that they expect websites to. Sadly, usability studies show us that a lot of clients make a decision as to by from a company based solely on their first impression. A templated site leaves a lot to be desired.

So we’ve established that cheap web design is definitely not a good value and is very likely to have increased costs beyond just the initial price tag. That increased cost means a worse ROI.

High end web design companies often suffer from a different issue. Bloat. It happens to all businesses once they’ve established a steady revenue stream and plan for growth. Its difficult to keep budgets tight, and costs sharp, if you aren’t concerned about where the next pay check is coming from. For web design firm this usually comes in additional employees not related to web design, development or marketing, and in expensive office locations more fit for retail foot traffic. Clients are often impressed by the friendly receptionist or the prime downtown office space. But they shouldn’t be! Why? Because they’re paying for it. All of those things (the big plasma in the lobby, the really sweet desk layouts) cost a lot of money, and although the company paid for them, that money came from other clients first. For me, I’d want to know that the $10,000 I was spending on a website was all going to develop the website. I wouldn’t want to know that $500 was going to that receptionist each month for the two calls she’ll handle, or that $1,500 is going towards the downtown office. I’d rather know that the company was scraping their costs as low as possible to ensure I received the maximum investment in my product.

And therein lies the secret to our success and why Coalition Technologies is the best web design company in Los Angeles (and Seattle). We provide the custom, secure, high functioning and forward thinking web designs that cheap companies do not offer. And since we keep our extraneous costs low, we are able to charge only for the web design work that we’re going to do. Up front, that means we provide a better value, and in the long run we provide a better ROI. Thus, we’re the best web design firm in LA.

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