Website Design

Working with Firethorn Marketing

you won’t be left wondering what’s next. During each step of the project, we communicate clearly, following a proven system for creating successful business website solutions. We customize that process based on your needs but one thing remains the same: each project is structured to be on-time, within budget, and without surprises. All of our sites are build with a CMS and are Fully Responsive!

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All Our Sites Are Fully Responsive And Built With A CMS!

What Is A Fully Responsive Web Site?

Responsive Web Design delivers a website that is optimized for every device, no matter the screen size. When embarking on creating a new website for your business, planning for multiple devices and screen sizes is absolutely necessary. If you want to get the most out of your website and make the most impact on the digital world, implementing responsive web design is a must. We can ensure that you will have a digital presence on any device it’s viewed on. Not only are there over 230 different screen sizes, but the percentage of visitors that are viewing websites on a mobile device and/or tablet rapidly grows each year. Therefore, if your website isn’t optimized for the varying screen sizes, it can hurt your conversion rates and lead flow. Implementing responsive web design means that a separate mobile website isn’t necessary and the need to update your website to accommodate every new device that emerges into the digital world disappears.

You Might Be Asking “What’s A CMS?”

CMS stands for Content Management System. In the world of internet marketing and web design, a CMS allows for great flexibility in managing a website. Need to make a quick change to a piece of content or add an image to a page? Need to add a new product or category to your ecommerce website? With a CMS, these tasks can be completed quickly and easily without needing advanced computer skills requirement or learning how to program HTML/CSS.

At Firethorn Marketing, we’ve decided to utilize 2 different content management systems. We use WordPress to build informational sites and smaller ecommerce storefronts. For larger, more complex ecommerce storefronts, we build sites using MonsterCommerce.

Why WordPress?

With the proper know-how and tools, WordPress is highly customizable. Many people think that in order to build a powerful WordPress site, it is necessary to use a pre-existing template and install numerous extra plugins. In our experience, this is simply not true. Our designers and developers work together to create a completely custom user interface and experience for your website. We also prefer to use as few plugins as possible in order to ensure that all of the sites we build are both compatible and secure.

Not only is WordPress powerful, it also features a user-friendly administrative back-end that makes it easier to manage content after a website launch. While developing and building a site with our partners, we try to put ourselves in their shoes. This allows us to think through the day-to-day processes they will encounter once they begin to work with their new WordPress site.

By customizing their WordPress admin dashboard, we ensure that the needs of our partners will be met by their new site. To do this, we first customize the WordPress login page to match the branding and look/feel of a website’s design. This is a great start to creating a quality WordPress admin user experience (UX), but we take things a few steps further. We also make use of Custom Post Types (CPTs) to create additional WordPress post types, such as FAQs, Team Members, Photo Galleries or Testimonials. As with traditional Posts and Pages, these types can then be viewed and edited in the WordPress Admin, allowing our partners to display pertinent information on different page templates effectively.

The final step is hiding the unnecessary. Because WordPress is such a powerful CMS, it includes many additional tools and settings in the administrative back-end that are most useful when developing a site. To make the WordPress admin as easy to use as possible, we minimize potential sources of distraction by going through and disabling or hiding some of these additional add-ons. This makes editing site content an easier and more secure experience

Why MonsterCommerce?

So why do we use BigCommerce to power larger ecommerce sites for our partners? Well, for starters, BigCommerce is the world’s leading ecommerce platform, powering more than 50,000 online stores to more than $3 billion in sales! BigCommerce is also simple to use. The administrative dashboard displays vital statistics for your storefront as soon as you login. Products and categories can be added to your site one at a time through the admin back-end or uploaded in bulk with a CSV spreadsheet. The ability to bulk import product, category, and customer data is a huge advantage to those online retailers with a large product catalog or an extensive existing customer base.

For larger online retailers, another key benefit to BigCommerce is managed hosting and security. BigCommerce boasts a 99% uptime across more than 50,000 sites, and uses the latest and greatest methods available to monitor and protect each of these sites from attacks and intrusions. All of this happens automatically, without requiring their partners to lift a finger. And, because MonsterCommerce is a hosted service, they are 100% PCI-compliant. This means that your site is always secure, and always ready to take new orders.

Not unlike our WordPress sites, our designers and developers are capable of creating stunning, easy-to-use, custom ecommerce storefronts. While BigCommerce does offer out-of-box templates (Themes), we believe it is important to custom-create each template from the ground up so that each site is a perfect match for the brand and audience.

If you’ve ever used WordPress, you’re likely familiar with the concept of using plugins to add additional functionality to your site. With MonsterCommerce, they offer their App Marketplace which allows the addition of extra “Apps” or modules to be used with your MonsterCommerce storefront. These apps allow for greater functionality and integration with other software such as QuickBooks, ShipStation, MailChimp and more.

MonsterCommerce also makes it easy to manage your store on the go with their dedicated iOS and Android apps! Just download the correct app for your phone or tablet device and you can manage your orders, customers and products from anywhere with an internet connection.