Superior Web Design Bed-Stuy | ProStrategix

Newyork10r at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bed-Stuy, Gentrification with a Twist.

Billy Joel, a musician popular in the early 1980s, has a lyric in his song “You May Right”, where he sings “I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone”...”which only proves that I’m insane”. I only share this because it is such stark contrast to what the neighborhood is today.

Bed-Stuy is one of the many neighborhoods in New York City where African-American culture has played a central role in its formation, and hopefully, its evolution. Typically, gentrification displaces the long-time residents. However, Bed-Stuy experienced less displacement than other areas in Brooklyn.  

Bed-Stuy offers a lot of choice for those who explore it and live there. It defies stereotypes. There are indie stores to Southern comfort restaurants. You can choose from French bistros to some of the best Carribean food in the city.  

For business in Bed-Stuy, the challenge is standing out in such a crowded and complex mix.

Why Local Digital Marketing Matters in Bed-Stuy?

In a gentrified neighborhood, your challenge isn’t so much in targeting as it is in standing out.  A stunning web design will definitely help you get your message out. 

  1. Web design in Bed-Stuy is about owning a small niche that’s novel and interesting. Then, expanding from it..
  2. It is important to raise awareness about your new concept quickly. Rents are not cheap, so you need to see results quickly.  A fast intuitive site can help you do just that.
  3. A fast mobile site lets your customers you are nearby, open, and accessible. No one likes to travel far if they can find something closer.

User Experience (UX): User’s Value Finding Information Fast.

When you ask users what they want, they will tell you. They want information fast. They care about finding information over 7 times more than the care about appearance.

Important factors of web design

Therefore, your design elements should focus on helping the user find pages on your site versus just creating visual impact. Otherwise,  60% of users leave a site if they can’t find what they need easily.

The 1 to 3-Second Rule

If a page takes over 3 seconds to load, mobile users bounce as the Pingdom chart below suggests.

Pingdom Bounce Rate vs. Page Speed

SEMRush gauges page speed using a 1 second rule. I would argue they are closer. My personal experience suggests that the widow has continued to narrow.

Main Drag on Page Speed is Unnecessary Code

If you are not a web designer or web developer, terms like render blocking ccs or unused JavaScript, will be very foreign. Knowing the terms are not as important as understanding the cause

Google Page Insights Illustrating render blocking resources

The root cause of most speed issues is the content management system (CMS) that you choose for your website. 

Themes Will Slow You Down

If your site is built on Wordpress or Wix, you are using a theme. Every theme carries a set of instructions (CSS), which tell the browser how to render the page. Every theme has customization options, drop-down menus, animations, and such.

When a page is rendered, the browser has to sort through all this code to see what your content requires. The unused features can stop the page from rendering, creating render-blocking resources or unused CSS. 

Theme Are Easy But Come at a Cost

A theme is user friendly. They are faster to build, easier to maintain, and simpler to update. You do not need to understand coding or even basic HTML or CSS commands to get great looking results. However, there is a big trade-off, and that is page speed.

Creativity Wins Points.

According to Best Designs, original graphics are the most successful. 

“Original graphics make up 40% of all successful visual content that accomplishes marketing goals, but 43% of marketers struggle with the consistent production of captivating visuals.”

Since we are communicating one message, the artwork that supports it must work very hard to support the message. This is where local market know-how can really help. Original photos and images of your business in Bedford-Stuyvesant interacting with your neighborhood can add value.

It also helps with when your calls to action focus on local events in and around Bedford-Stuyvesant or at your business location.

email marketing for small business call to action

Call to Action

Every email, no matter how trivial, should have a call to action. This is where all the hard work above pays off. If we omit one, we just wasted resources that could have been spent more cost effectively.

We cover email list building in great detail in our post on small business email marketing. Again, we will just hit the highlights here as it pertains to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Every neighborhood has summer fairs. While these were severely impacted by COVID, in our post COVID world they should roar back with a vengeance. It would be smart to see if you could piggy-back off one or more of them.

Incentives, deals, free trials, and samples are all great options when developing your calls to action. See if you can partner with your neighbors to create a shared promotion. This way one shopper in Bedford-Stuyvesant has two or more places to visit while out in the neighborhood.


Why Local Digital Marketing Matters in Bed-Stuy?

In a gentrified neighborhood, your challenge isn’t so much in targeting as it is in standing out.  Local digital marketing can help you get your message out. 

  1. Local digital marketing in Bed-Stuy is about owning a small niche that’s novel and interesting. Then, expanding from it..
  2. It is important to raise awareness about your new concept quickly. Rents are not cheap, so you need to see results quickly.  
  3. Local digital marketing lets your customers you are nearby, open, and accessible. No one likes to travel far if they can find something closer.

Simple Navigation That is Clear and Easy to Follow

To have a navigation that is easy to follow requires that you understand how your user is likely to search for information. It is very important to remember that your user may search for information very differently from you, especially if you are an expert in the field and they are not.

Importance of Page Mapping

To keep the communication focused, each page should be designed to answer a given set of questions around a core theme. Since we know the core theme, we can link these pages to keywords or key phrases. 

The key reasons why it is worth the effort to map pages to key words are:

  1. Helps to minimize confusion as each page has a clear answer or a means to reach that answer quickly.
  2. Helps indicate to the user and the bot what the page is about.

This is a key step in any design and development process.  

Measure & Monitor Your User Flow

People can be difficult to predict. Even with the best planning, sometimes the flow isn’t quite right. User flow on Google Analytics can really help. You can see how users are browsing the site. 

Optimizing

If you find users are acting differently versus how you intended. It’s important to take note and make changes. Web design is never “a set it and forget it” activity. Monthly monitoring and testing are recommended. 

Mobile friendly

A high-quality user experience is important on all devices. This is just the cost of entry these days.

Most themes and common website builders are responsive, which means it adapts the code (html and ccs) to suit the device. 

There are several ways to achieve a responsive design. The main tradeoff between the options is page speed.

We recommend custom sites because they are designed as mobile first. They use only the code that you need, so they are fast. Lastly, the lost revenue from bounces and poor conversions generally more than offset the cost.

All themes will require “fixing”. Without some way to weeding out that excess code, page speed load times will likely cause you to perform poorly on mobile. 

Data show page speed is a key indicator bounce rate. If your page takes over three seconds to load, bounce rates balloon. Any bounce is a lost opportunity to influence your user.

There are plugins and other solutions. But, again, there is a trade-off between cost and performance.

Summary

Your website is the most important communication tool in digital marketing. Therefore, you want it to be its best.

Users value finding information quickly. Finding the information quickly is seven times more important than fancy features.

To help users find the information they want quickly requires a simple navigation that is clear and easy to follow. 

A high-quality user experience is important on all devices. Therefore, you want a design that can meet these demands without sacrificing quality or speed. Both affect your website metrics.

This can be challenging to attempt this on your own, and there are numerous digital marketing companies that can help.

ProStraegix is a web design agency with offices in New York City. We also provide SEO and pay per click advertising support to our clients.

Things to Remember…

If you're thinking about finding help in Bed-Stuy for your small business, here are the things to keep in mind.

  1. Find a firm that knows your area. If your small business is marketing in Bed-Stuy or the surrounding area, you'll want help from someone who understands the lay of the land, character of the neighborhood and the daily flow..
  2. Find a company you can trust. If you can't trust a business to have your best interests, you're already going to be left in the lurch. Make sure you have a guarantee that your business will be treated fairly by all parties.
  3. Get the size of help you need. A larger firm can provide more resources and can do more things. A smaller firm, on the other hand, can be less intimidating, with the added benefit of one-on-one help from the best the company can offer.

How to Adapt Our Small Business SEO Tips for Bedford-Stuyvesant

Aside from all the general tips above, here are some specific actions you can take based on the three key elements of local search algorithms:

Proximity 

All of this assumes that you have completed your keyword research and developed your keyword list. If you have not, this section will be more effective once you do. Please see our previous post on digital marketing in Bedford-Stuyvesant and then come back.

Go through your keywords list and select those which are good descriptors of your business. If it were me, I would use something like “digital marketing agency”, “seo services”, for example. Then make a list of the regions/towns you service, for example “seo services stuyvesant heights”.

Now comes the harder part, that is frankly a bit tedious. For each combination, see if you can create a somewhat unique post that’s 500-1000 words for that keyword. For us, it is a post like this. I try to write a post that helps my potential clients learn something or do something they didn’t know they could. 

Prominence 

Now, this is the good part. If you do write quality posts for these keywords, you will be raising your prominence. Google knows that all these neighborhoods are in Bed-Stuy. So, for each good post you write, you help raise your prominence on a given topic in a given location.

Prominence is also helped by the basic techniques I mentioned earlier, such as being a part of local business groups. Please see the Bed-Stuy Community Organizations or Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce for listings that might pertain to you. Any local listing helps.

Relevance

This is why I like the blog technique because it hits all three key areas. If your keyword is a descriptor of what you do and the neighborhood is one you serve, it is highly that you will score points on relevance.

Finding the right SEO for your small business in a neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant can be a crucial way to get your company noticed online.

The same tips would apply if you were wanted to go more broadly, for example, the city level with Local SEO NYC

See more about Small Business Marketing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. If you are more interest in the borough, you can see our Small Business Marketing in Brooklyn. If you want the full city, you can see our Small Business Marketing in NYC.