Website Design and Development Reasons. Why Merkados?

Merkados Planning:

We consider your industry and your competition when planning your new website. Improving upon what they are doing and staying away from their mistakes. However, your website is not designed based on theirs. We make sure that our marketing experience shines through your site and that it becomes a profitable machine.

We make sketches both for structure and for look & feel. That way we ensure that your main marketing goals are being served. Making a profitable website by accident, even though might be possible, is extremely hard. On the other hand, when you have a well defined plan to make your sites profitable, you are more likely to succeed. That's what we do.

Our experience with other websites allows us to keep a set of standards that will benefit your website instantly. In graphic design you know what your outcome is going to be. On the web, people have different monitors, color profiles, resolutions and they have different plugins for a wide variety of browsers. Standards of design are the only way you can minimize the effect of those differences. Hiring an experienced web designer is the only way to gain from their planning experience.

Merkados™ Design:

We design with pixel precision. You may not be convinced of how important this is, until your website breaks because of 1 pixel and it needs to be fixed. A Merkados™ website has somewhere near 1.2 Million pixels per page. Our design starts with a resolution of 1200 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high. Imagine what would happen if we were not careful at the pixel level. This is where most designers differ from us. We do care about small details. So that later neither you nor us have to worry about a broken website.

We design using the most advanced website design tools available. There are plenty of tools out there for web design. And using the best tools in the business doesn't always ensure a good product. In our case, however, we can only use the best tools available because our websites demand them. Using the most advanced web design software allows Merkados™ to push the envelope when it comes to delivering an exceptional product.

We are trained professionals. Some people proclaim themselves as web designers the minute they get a computer. It is like somebody calling himself a surgeon just because he just got a new set of kitchen knives. Some of our clients, before coming to us, had a nephew design their website. They finally and quickly realized that website design is like everything else, you can't just do it on your weekends and be good at it. At Merkados™, our designers are trained designers, certified by a digital media college and they do care about color schemes, typography, navigation and negative space. They care for those things so that you don't have to.

Merkados™ Coding.

We are as careful with our coding as we are with our design. Some web designers are very talented visually, but when it comes to coding they lack the necessary skills. At Merkados™ we don't automate the coding of your site. We code line by line, character by character all by hand. Sure it would be easier to let a computer write the code for your design and go home earlier. In our case, we do things differently. By coding your website by hand, we ensure two things: 1. In the event of a future problem, we can identify it easily and cost-effectively. 2. We ensure that it will work as intended. Including the ability to make your website search engine friendly. Imagine the amount of time it would take for somebody to read your code line by line, and correct what the software has written in order to make it SEO friendly. Since we code everything from scratch, your website will be search engine friendly, period.

Coding with W3C Standards. We code your website pages with W3C compliant XHTML and CSS. Does it make a difference to have valid XHTML and CSS? We think so. When the browsers have no problem rendering your site, first you gain speed serving the website to your clients, but second, you allow search crawlers to do a better job indexing your site. Many designers are still coding with tables and not with cascading style sheets. In today's Internet, it is of extreme importance to separate markup, content and styles.

Porting to a state of the art Content Management System.

Having a CMS might not mean a great deal to you right now, however as your site progresses, you will want to make changes to the site. Add photos, add more content, change the navigation, add sections, etc. All those changes traditionally have been made by a webmaster. In other words, every time you wanted to add anything to your site you have to pay a webmaster fee that ranges anywhere from $40 to $175 per hour. That may not be much but it can add up pretty fast. Merkados™ approach is quite different. We build our websites with a CMS and we train you on how to use that CMS so that you are in control of the content of your site. You can add content at any time, you can change photos, write blog posts or simply modify a typo. All without paying a single dime. If you really want to bring your business online you are going to have to maintain it.

Available Modularity. Let's say in the future you want to add Twitter and Facebook updates to your website. In a regular agency, they would figure the number of hours that it would take to create a script that does that for you. Then, they would quote you accordingly. At Merkados™ we have access to a database of over 1200 modules. Therefore all we have to do is look for the functionality that you are looking for and implement it in your website. Think of the savings that you will experience just by not having to code every single functionality that you think of.

Separation of Content and Style. Remember the separation of content and style we were talking about before? Think about what would happen when you get ready to redesign your site once again, lets say 5 years down the road. The web changes so rapidly this days that the techniques available will virtually force you to change the look of your site. Most business will start looking once again for an agency and spend a large amount of money to do it all over again. In our case, we spent a lot of time in the foundation of your site so that we don't have to do that again. If you have a solid foundation, you can change everything else while maintaining that foundation. Since we separated style from content, you can redesign only the look & feel of your site without having to modify your content and structure. Think in the future when you have a completely new website at a fraction of the cost. That is why separating content and style is so important.

Measuring and Maximizing.

- If you don't measure the effectiveness of your website to accomplish your goals how can you tell that you are succeeding or failing? The only way to know if you are getting closer to an objective is by measuring. All of our website have a native installation of an advanced analytics package: Google Analytics. You will receive a comprehensive report delivered to your inbox every week. This report will contain a summary of your site's visitation numbers, referrals, visitor location sources and much more. It is obvious that by gaining all this knowledge you will be empowered to make better online marketing decisions.

Promotion.

Designing a great website is only half of the battle. The other half is to promote it on the web so that everybody knows about it. Merkados™ offers a wide variety of website promotion options available to you. From advancing your SEO to paid advertising to video distribution. Merkados™ can provide you with real options to succeed online.

Merkados™ main office is located in the Triangle Area (Raleigh-Cary-Chapel Hill) North Carolina. The combination of state-of-the-art interactive marketing strategies with optimized operation costs makes our product portfolio a very competitive one.

Merkados's mission is to provide the highest quality possible of interactive marketing services in the world at optimized cost and to bring certainty of online sucess to our clients. We only serve customer-driven clients that build, empower or improve mankind in one way or another. We reserve the right to reject or approve any campaign.

Industries in which we don't work:

• Weapons
• Hacking and Cracking
• Online Casinos nor Gambling of any kind
• Presciption Drugs
• Alcohol
• Insurance Affiliates
• Cable nor Satellite Affiliates

View Merkados™ Interactive Partners - Office in a larger map