Web Design and Development
Telling your story online
Your website is an important component of how you communicate with your customers, citizens, students, community or other constituents. Applying the integrated marketing and storytelling focus from our marketing services to your website can increase the value of your site to your audience and your business.
Websites for non-profit organizations
Lewis Studios has extensive experience with non-profits and their website and marketing needs. When it comes to websites, we focus on telling your story, engaging the public and making giving easy. We also have experience serving on the boards of non-profits, running fundraising and marketing campaigns for non-profits and implementing non-profit Customer/Donor Relationship Management and Marketing Automation solutions. We focus on non-profits because we love missions that do good and want to see you succeed. Doing good, while doing well, by helping non-profits at reasonable prices is a deeply satisfying business to be in.
- Telling your story: Why you do what you do matters a lot. Telling the story moves people from interested to donating or volunteering.
- Engaging the public: It is not enough to tell the story well and get found in internet searches. We help you capture contact information and continue the conversation with your audience so you can convert one-time interest into lasting support and timely action.
- Making giving easy: We create donation pages that fit your budget and skill while not driving away your donors. If giving is difficult or confusing, donors abandon the process. There are some great donation solutions in the market but many are too expensive and difficult for small non-profits. We’ve developed solutions that fit any organization’s budget. We want you to raise a lot more than you spend!
Small, growing business welcome too!
We love helping non-profits. We also love helping small and growing businesses, especially startups. Our team volunteers to mentor new entrepreneurs with Entrepreneurship for All. We get as much as we give from these relationships and it strengthens our ability to serve other startups and small businesses in our business.
Mass Customization, not One-Size-Fits-All
There are many great tools for building simple websites. If all you need is a basic page or a few pages that look fantastic, these may be the right solution for you. We’re here for those that need a little or a lot more. Donation pages, custom content types, simple admin tools specific to your industry or organization’s content and audiences, enter data once and show it several ways and great user experiences on all kinds of devices.
Complete service
Lewis Studios can host and operate your site to keep your expertise and focus on running your business, not web development and IT operations. Our services range from strategy and content advice to full development, operation and continuous optimization.
Content, Content, Content
In real estate, the mantra is location, location, location. On websites, it is content, content, content. In today’s audience-centric media, content provides the value and content gets you found. Our web design method is content first. Whether words, audio, photos, video or combinations make the most sense for your business, our design will feature the right content, in the right formats for the right audience on the right devices.
Did we mention content?
Because content is such an important part of your website, it is important that authoring new content be easy. Most of our designs leverage leading Content Management Systems (CMSes) such as WordPress to provide ready-made content platforms with easy authoring tools, editorial review processes (separating author from publisher, for example) and rich support for Search Engine Optimization, eCommerce and other functions through extensive plug-in libraries. You shouldn’t pay us to reinvent the wheel. We leverage plug-ins that perform well and solve real needs.
Customization the right way
Sometimes we do have to customize your site by developing functionality that isn’t available in the core platform or a well behaved plug-in. For example, we developed a database of conservation lands, land stewards and volunteers for a recent conservation trust project and built custom WordPress pages to display an overview table, individual trail pages and a complete guide to conservation lands in the town from the database and folders of photos and map images. When we renovated the Walden Woods Project’s website, we built a collections system for the collected works of Henry David Thoreau. In both cases the custom development allowed for entering data only once and displaying it several different ways. The clients could’ve done it all without customization but would have had to enter, and maintain, the data in 3 – 4 different places.
Measurement and Improvement
We don’t just analyze your needs and deliver a site with a “good luck” and handshake. The best way to make sure your website performs optimally is to experiment, measure and adjust repeatedly. Using Google Analytics and other measurement tools, we test the changes we make to your site and continue to refine words, colors, button placement and many other elements that lead to the best performance.
Get Started
Many of our clients began with an assessment of their current site. Our assessments are driven by marketing requirements, not just looks and performance. We don’t hold back anything in our reports. You can follow the recommendations yourself, with another vendor or with Lewis Studios.