Web developer in Raleigh-Durham: a page for each city you serve
You get a web developer in Raleigh-Durham who works from Kolkata, India, and a site built around how your customers find you. For a practice, a trade or a clinic, I start with the list of towns you serve. For a research or life-sciences firm selling across the country, I start with your published work instead.
Overview
Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill on separate pages
Someone searching for a clinic in Durham is matched with pages that say Durham, so each town you serve gets a page with its name in the title and the first heading. A Chapel Hill page carries the address customers there drive to and the services you offer in that town.
There's real distance between the three. So I ask how far you'll travel for a job, and the site names only the towns you'll go to.
Research, university and life-sciences firms get a different plan. Their buyers are national, so town names move to the contact page, and the first screen leads with what you research and who you've worked with.
Side by side
What goes near the top for local and national buyers
Where your buyers live changes the structure of the site, not just a few of its words. A firm that does both kinds of work gets both, on separate pages.
First screen
- A practice, trade or clinic
- Your services and the towns you cover
- A research or life-sciences firm
- Your field and your track record
Where you are
- A practice, trade or clinic
- Directions and parking for customers who visit
- A research or life-sciences firm
- Kept to the contact page, since buyers are nationwide
Next to the contact button
- A practice, trade or clinic
- Opening times and a phone number for each office
- A research or life-sciences firm
- The scale of work you can take on
How far will you drive for a job?
Mark on a map the furthest you'll drive for a job. Have it open in our meeting, and we'll go through the towns inside that line one by one.
Where this comes from
The work behind this, in numbers
My record reaches 900+ projects completed since 2017, and the American part of it is 600+ projects for US clients.
You read each town page on a private staging link, on your own phone, and mark anything a customer there wouldn't recognise.
I work from Kolkata, India, and we meet on video calls.
The team works on your schedule, in your time zone.
What a scope from me looks like
A first scope for a business working in several towns
Wording on your current site carries across wherever it's still accurate, and you'll mark anything that isn't.
If most of your buyers turn out to be national, the research pages come first and the town work moves to phase two.
Included
- A written scope: every page and feature as its own line, agreed before work starts
- Design to build, reviewed on a staging URL that stays open the whole project
- Mobile first — checked on a real phone
- Domain, hosting and every account created in your name from day one
- A contact page listing every town you cover
- Basic on-page SEO: titles, descriptions, headings, sitemap, Search Console connected
- A runbook at handover: how to edit it, what renews and when
Phase two
- Pages for towns you add later
- A section for research or life-sciences work sold nationally
- Ongoing SEO once the site has traffic to read
- A maintenance plan once the site is live
- Logo and brand design, quoted separately from the build
Not doing
- Guaranteed rankings
- Listing a town you won't travel to
What moves the number
What makes the job bigger or smaller
The size follows from what's already on hand and what still needs making. Offices, photographs and finished designs all count on the first side.
- How many towns you cover
- Whether part of the business sells to research buyers across the country
- Opening times, phone numbers and maps for each office
- Designs from a designer you already work with, built as they are
- Photographs of each office, if you have them
- Starting with one town and adding the others in phase two
Nearby
Elsewhere in the South and East
Atlanta's plan puts regular customers and conference visitors in one site, Nashville's is built for referral-led practices and firms, and New Haven's sets out the credentials page a university checks before it approves a supplier.
FAQ
Before the page list is fixed
Design starts from the page list in the written scope.
How are opening times kept right across several offices?
- Each office's opening times and phone number are entered once, in the dashboard, and every page that shows them reads from that entry. When a branch closes early for a holiday, one change covers the town page, the contact page and the footer. You try it yourself before handover.
What changes for a firm with national customers?
- A firm with national customers gets a site that leads with its field and its track record. The effort goes into the pages a research buyer reads before getting in touch, such as published work and the team behind it, and the towns shrink to a single line.
Can the build start from another designer's files?
- Files from a website designer you already work with are built as they are. Where a template is missing, the designer on my team draws one in the same style, and it goes to your designer for approval before it's built.
What happens to rankings the current site has?
- Rankings the current site has for a town name are listed before the switch. Each of those pages is sent on to its replacement, so search engines can follow the change. Pages that never ranked can be retired, and you'll see that list before anything is switched off.
Who builds the site?
- I lead the site from the first meeting to the handover. The work is split between three developers, a designer and three SEO specialists in the Kolkata, India office, plus around six people working remotely.
Next step
Where your last jobs came from
Your recent invoices already show which towns the site should name first. If you can pull the ZIP codes off them, I'll have a draft page plan ready for our meeting.
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