At Howard Development & Consulting, we provide high-end, full-service web design and development for creative agencies and entrepreneurs. If you’re looking for a start-to-finish new web site for your business or organization, or if you need experts in WordPress and Shopify to support your in-house design team, you’ve come to the right place.
Ready to book your free introductory call? Here’s our calendar →
Web Site Design & Branding
Our experienced design team will help you build a modern and flexible visual design for your new web project. If you’re looking for a redesign or building a new site from scratch, you’ll work closely with our design experts to craft a vision for your site, ensure your web presence reflects your brand, and create the additional assets (such as a new logo or branding guide) your business or organization needs to launch a successful web experience.
If you’re a creative agency or a marketing department with an in-house design team, we can also support you with supplementary design services, freeing up your team for the big-picture work while we build out additional pages and features based on your vision.
Every design project will start with an extensive discovery phase, where we’ll interview you and your stakeholders to define the goals, audience, and overall look and feel of your new site. We’ll then design initial wireframes to give you a preview of your site’s new layout, followed by the creation of modern, mobile-friendly, and flexible designs matching your ideal visual aesthetic.
WordPress Development
We build pixel-perfect custom WordPress themes, and we develop advanced custom plugins to solve entrepreneurs’ biggest business challenges.
Our typical WordPress development project starts with the development of a custom theme based on your design – which may be a design we created for you during the Web Site Design & Branding phase or a design provided by your in-house design team. We’ll scrupulously develop pixel-perfect code to ensure the living, breathing experience on your web site exactly matches the designs you’ve already approved. We’ll also take care of mobile responsiveness, performance and Core Web Vitals optimization, SEO best practices, and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards in all of our code.
Once the front-end of your site is ready – that is, the public, visitor-facing visuals – we’ll build a content-management experience that allows you and your team to easily manage all the key areas of your site, without any technical knowledge required. We’ll provide you with personalized training, which will be recorded so you can share the video with new team members who take on content responsibilities down the road. Our goal is to empower you to manage everything about your site, with minimal need for a developer as you make changes to the site in the future.
For many clients, we also develop custom tools and plugins – for example, advanced e-commerce integrations or corporate intranet tools. We’ll work with you to assess your needs and build lean, powerful solutions to help your business or organization grow.
Looking for an “out of the box” solution? We can also work with you to select a commercial WordPress theme, which we’ll customize to fit your brand, allowing you to bypass much of the custom design process and launch a quality site quickly and cost-effectively.
After launch, we provide ongoing security and maintenance services as part of our WordPress Assurance program. This means you’ll always have skip-the-line access to our team, as well as continuous software updates, security check-ups, and the peace of mind that your site is in good hands.
Shopify & E-Commerce Development
We’ve always been e-commerce pros, but the worldwide shift to online and delivery transactions has made our clients’ e-commerce solutions an even more critical part of their businesses and organizations. We build powerful, customized e-commerce solutions using Shopify, WooCommerce (which is part of WordPress), and Magento.
We can help you assess your needs and choose the right platform for your business, based on more than a decade of experience building sites with the most popular e-commerce software. These projects can include a full design phase, or can lean on the many existing commercial themes available to allow you to stand up a quality e-commerce site quickly and cost-effectively. We’ll also assist with setting up your payments systems, custom applications and add-ons, and optimizing your e-commerce experience for search engines and accessibility.
Search Engine Optimization, PageSpeed & Core Web Vitals
Many of our clients rely on our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expertise to bring in hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors to their web properties. We’ll provide expertise in building web site code that’s easy for Google and other search engines to index and understand. We’ll ensure you’re up to date on the latest tools of the trade – including optimizing your site for load times, as measured by Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. Improving site speed is great for your bounce rate and ad sales, but is also becoming an important ranking factor in and of itself. That’s why we literally wrote the book on Core Web Vitals and have helped many of our clients score in the top tier, far outpacing their competition.
Our Search Engine Optimization team can also help you audit your current site to identify issues, concerns, and opportunities for growth, and we can help you select keywords to target for new content. Alongside our on-page technology solutions, these off-page SEO services provide you with a full suite of tools to help your site bring in more traffic from organic search.
Scaling WordPress & Amazon Web Services
Our clients handle millions of monthly page views without a hiccup on our custom, lightning-fast AWS stacks. Our AWS Certified Solutions Architects help you trim down and scale-up, even when other developers say it can’t be done.
We’ll work with you to select the ideal hosting solution for your project, ranging from high-quality commercial hosting to fully custom Amazon Web Services solutions. We’ll work with you to select firewalls and content delivery networks that ensure the highest level of security and the fastest possible speeds for your site.
Salesforce, Hubspot & Digital Marketing Consulting
We love building fast, beautiful web sites – and we’re even more excited when they bring in quantifiable new opportunities that help our clients businesses and organizations grow. That’s why we’ll help you with consulting on the best digital marketing tools – including e-mail marketing, advanced analytics, and integrations with popular customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Hubspot and Salesforce. Our expertise in API integrations and custom development means we’ll be able to build the exact lead workflow that your team needs to track its progress and quantify its success.
Our Partnerships with Creative Agencies
Since 2009, we’ve partnered with more than 150 creative agencies to deliver high-end, pixel-perfect web projects to their clients. When we partner with an agency, we merge our decades of experience in design, advertising and journalism with our technology and start-up expertise. That means our team fits in seamlessly to your agency’s existing workflow, and we can support you in any or all of the services we’ve outlined here – whether we’re building a new site based on your designs or augmenting your team by adding design, SEO and support services.
To dig deeper into the services and expertise we provide for agencies, check out the 7-minute video below.
