Website development company in District of Columbia

WordPress suits a team that publishes frequently and wants to edit most of the site itself. Its plugins offer a wide choice of features, although someone needs to keep them updated for security. A custom Next.js site suits a design that needs freedom from templates and a business happy to ask a developer to make structural changes. Think about who will look after the site as well as who will launch it.

A hosted builder such as Wix, Squarespace or Webflow suits a small site you want to run alone. You give up some control over code and speed, and moving away later can mean rebuilding. A headless setup pairs a custom front end with a separate editor; it suits heavy editing alongside a need for speed, with more parts to host and maintain.

We recommend WordPress or custom Next.js after learning how your team works. Tell us what you expect to change yourselves and which changes you would prefer a developer to handle.

For a business open to the public, US guidance says ADA Title III covers goods and services offered on the web. We agree an accessibility target in the brief and use WCAG success criteria to guide the page designs and build. The W3C encourages using its latest version, so agree the target before design work begins.

For a state or local government website, the ADA Title II rule specifies WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We set that requirement in the project brief so the pages are designed and built against it.

Start gathering content early: service descriptions, team biographies, case studies and photos often take longer to assemble than a design takes to approve.

• Rank the services or products you want to feature, so the navigation reflects your priorities.
• Bring your vector logo, brand colours and fonts, or note what still needs creating.
• Share sites you like and dislike, with a short reason for each choice.
• Gather real photos of your team, premises and finished work; book photography ahead if needed.
• Collect case studies, permitted client logos, testimonials and relevant credentials in a folder.
• Find the login details for your domain, hosting, email and measurement accounts, or identify who holds them.

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  Designing around placeholder copy

  Bring real headings and paragraphs into the layouts early, before their lengths disrupt an approved design.

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  Letting an agency hold your accounts

  Register the domain and hosting in your business’s name and grant access to the people doing the work.

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  Reviewing on a large screen alone

  Check every page on a phone before approving the design.

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  Leaving search setup until launch

  Check page titles, the sitemap and any development indexing block before the site goes live.