Website Design for University City, Charlotte B2B Firms

Pass the phone test before a buyer reaches a desk

A vendor link can easily get its first look on a phone, between meetings. If your site works with one thumb on a small screen, you pass the first test.

Picture a procurement analyst on a Thursday, working through a stack of vendor files between two meetings. Your link sits in an email she opens on her phone in the hallway. She's deciding one thing: does this company get a proper look later, at her desk? Big purchases still get signed at a desk, and this first tap decides who gets that far.

It matters even more for firms selling to the large employers around University City, whose buyers hear from a steady stream of vendors. Your first screen has to say what you do and who it's for. It also has to load before she reaches the conference room door.

1. Open your homepage on your phone, standing up Hold the phone in one hand, the way you would with a coffee in the other.
2. Find what you sell within five seconds If the first screen is a slogan over a stock photo, a busy buyer is already gone.
3. Tap your phone number It should start a call. If it just sits there as plain text, fix it this week.
4. Open one service page Check that the text reads without zooming and the buttons aren't crammed together.
5. Text the page to yourself Look at the preview that shows up. The title and picture should make sense with no other context.

Should we build a separate mobile site?

No. One site that adjusts to the screen is far simpler to keep current. We build every page for a phone first, then widen it for the desk.

What about a big video on the homepage?

We'd skip autoplay video on the first screen. It's heavy on a phone connection, and a buyer standing in a hallway mostly wants to read what you do and who you do it for.

A vendor-ready page that saves the buyer three emails

Big companies bring on vendors with forms and checklists. A plain page listing what you can provide, and who to ask for it, cuts that back-and-forth short before it starts.

• Your legal business name, and any assumed name you trade under.
• Proof of insurance, available on request.
• A W-9, available on request.
• Who fills in security questionnaires, if your work touches a buyer's systems or data.
• Payment terms you accept, like net 30 or company cards.
• Who handles vendor paperwork, by name and email.
• How you handle customer data, in plain words, if you touch any.

Vendor setup at a large company can take weeks, and much of that is waiting on documents. A page like this won't replace their forms. It shows you're organized before anyone asks, and it hands the buyer a link to forward to their own procurement team. When we build one, we start from vendor forms the owner has already filled in, since those show exactly what buyers ask.

Keep it plain on purpose, with no slogans and no stock photos. The analyst who processes vendor files reads a lot of them, often with a checklist open in the next window. Headings that match her checklist let her tick boxes without hunting.

Link this page from your footer and from the bottom of every service page, with a label like For procurement teams. Buyers who need it will spot it right away, and everyone else can ignore it without the page getting in their way.

Case studies when your biggest clients made you sign an NDA

You can show real work without naming the client. Describe the kind of company, the problem and what changed, then get the client's OK on the wording before anything goes live.

1. Describe the client without naming them Use the industry, the rough size and the region. That's usually enough for a buyer to picture them.
2. State the problem in the client's words What was broken, slow or risky before you arrived? Quote the feeling, even if you can't quote the person.
3. Walk through what you did Keep it to the few steps that mattered. A buyer wants to see how you think. The full ticket history can stay in your files.
4. Share the results the client approves Ranges and percentages often clear an NDA where hard numbers can't.
5. Send the draft to the client first Get a written OK. It protects the relationship, and clients sometimes offer a quote once they see it.

Buyers at big companies know how NDAs work, since their own lawyers write them. To them, an unnamed case study reads as normal. A site with no proof at all raises more eyebrows, and so does a logo wall that would make the named companies wince. When we draft one of these with a client, the NDA stays open beside the draft, and anything it covers stays out.

Build each case study around one problem and one change, short enough to read in two minutes. Three solid ones will carry more weight with a careful buyer than a dozen thin ones padded out to fill a page.

A careers page that works for UNC Charlotte applicants

If you hire students or new graduates from UNC Charlotte, your careers page is a second front door. Say what the job is, what it pays and how to apply from a phone.

• The job title people actually search for, in plain words.
• Pay, or at least an honest pay range.
• Hours, and whether they bend around a class schedule.
• Where the work happens, and how to get there without a car.
• What the first week looks like.
• One short application that works on a phone.

Students apply from their phones between classes. A careers page that asks them to download a file, fill it in and email it back loses plenty of them at step one. A short form with a resume upload keeps them moving.

Add a line or two from someone who started with you as a student hire, with their permission. It tells an applicant more than any paragraph about company culture could. It also shows that people stay, which is the question every applicant is quietly asking.

Should we post jobs on our own site if we already use job boards?

Yes. Boards come and go, while your own page stays put. Link from each board posting back to your careers page, so applicants can learn who you are before they apply.

Do internships belong on the same page?

They can, in a section of their own, with the season and weekly hours spelled out. Many students plan internships well ahead, so leave a note saying when the next round opens.

The forward test: how your page looks in a buyer's meeting

Buyers forward pages, print them and paste them into slides for the boss. Check how a service page looks as a PDF, with your name, a date and a way to reach you still attached.

1. Print a service page to PDF Use your browser's print option and save the file instead of sending it to a printer.
2. Look hard at page one Menus, cookie banners and chat bubbles often sit on top of the first lines. Your service should be the first thing a reader sees.
3. Check for your name and contact Your company's name and a phone number or email should appear somewhere on the printout.
4. Look for a date A last-updated date tells the reader the page isn't three years stale.
5. Fix it with a print style A small bit of code can hide menus and pop-ups when someone prints. It's an afternoon's job for whoever maintains the site, and it's one we'd add to any site we build.

A buyer who likes your page rarely decides alone. They forward it to a manager, drop it in a shared folder or print it for a Tuesday meeting. If the printout is half cookie banner, your careful wording never reaches the people who sign off. We'd check the printout early on any draft.

Run it on every service page before launch, at about two minutes a page. Then picture that Tuesday meeting: a printout on the table and a manager with a pen, circling your name and phone number. In that room, the printout may be the only version of your site anyone sees.

• Your company's name near the top of page one.
• The page title, plus a last-updated date.
• A phone number or email we can see without squinting.
• The page's web address, so a reader can find it again.
• No menus, banners or chat bubbles covering the words.

Who holds the keys: domain, hosting and every login

Before any redesign, make sure your company owns the domain, the hosting account and the admin logins. A site you can't reach after a designer leaves is a site you'll pay to rebuild.

People move on, and small agencies sometimes close. If the domain sits in a former designer's personal account, getting your own site back can take weeks of emails and a good deal of patience.

Ask any designer, us included, to put every account in your company's name from the start. Setting it up that way on day one takes no extra work, and it spares you an awkward phone call years from now.

When we take over an existing site, this list is one of the first jobs we'd tackle. It's dull work that pays off later, on the day a renewal notice or a password reset lands in the right inbox.

Our old designer registered the domain under their own name. What now?

Ask politely for a transfer to a company account. Registrars have a standard transfer process for this. We can walk you through each step on a call, and it's usually quick once the current holder agrees.

Can our in-house IT person keep control of email and security settings?

Of course. Agree early on who owns hosting, email and security, so nobody steps on anyone's toes during the build.

Accessibility checks you can run this afternoon

Some large buyers ask vendors about accessibility, and every visitor gains from the fixes. A few quick checks catch the problems that shut out keyboard users and people with low vision.

1. Put the mouse away Press Tab to move through the page. You should always see where you are, and you should reach every button and link.
2. Zoom to 200 percent Text should reflow to fit the screen, with nothing cut off or stacked on top of other text.
3. Check your images Every photo that carries meaning needs a short text description. Purely decorative ones can skip it.
4. Test your colors Pale gray text on white looks elegant and reads badly. A free contrast checker settles it in seconds.
5. Fill in the form without a mouse Every field needs a visible label, and error messages should say plainly what went wrong.

None of this needs a specialist to get started. It needs twenty minutes and a willingness to use your own site the hard way. The usual yardstick is WCAG 2.2 at level AA. It even sets a minimum tap target of 24 by 24 CSS pixels, which matters for a buyer on a phone.

The payoff goes past any buyer's checklist. Clear labels, readable text and a page that works without a mouse make the site easier for everyone, including the buyer squinting at a phone by a sunny window.

How often should we rerun these checks?

Whenever a new kind of page goes live, like a careers page or a new form. We also like a quick pass once a year, since small edits add up.

Will a buyer really ask about this?

Some will, especially larger organizations with their own standards. Either way, the fixes help every visitor, so we treat them as part of a normal build.

Tip a month of form messages onto the table and sort them

Traffic counts won't tell you if a new site reaches business buyers. Sort one month of form messages into piles before launch, then sort a month after launch the same way.

Look at what happened there. Fewer messages came in, and the pile that matters grew from five to twelve. A report that only counted visits or total messages would call June a step backward. The owner would call it a great month, and the owner would be right.

Sorting takes about fifteen minutes with a coffee on the first working day of the month. Drop each message into one of five piles: company address naming a service, company address with a vague question, free address, job seeker or junk. Talk to whoever answers the form, too. They'll often sense a change before the piles show it, and that hunch is worth writing down beside the counts. If we're working together, bring both to our monthly call.

1. Send every entry to one sheet Most form tools can copy each entry into a spreadsheet as it arrives.
2. Tag each entry with its pile Add one column and fill it in as messages land, so the monthly count is a quick sort instead of an archaeology dig.
3. Count on the first working day of the month Tally the five piles and set them beside last month's numbers. It takes about fifteen minutes.

Make the proposal and the website tell the same story

A buyer reads your proposal with your website open in the next tab. If the services, names or numbers don't match, doubt creeps in. Line them up before anything goes out.

Buyers compare documents more closely than most vendors expect. Picture that same analyst with your proposal in one window and your team page in the other. She spots a project lead who isn't on the site and writes a question in the margin. Now that question sits between you and a signature.

Keep one shared file of the facts that appear in both places: service names, team members, headcount and founding year. Change the file first, then the proposal template and the site. It's ten minutes of discipline that saves an awkward question in the room. If we build your site, we'll ask for that file on day one and write every page from it.

Our proposal template is years old. Where do we start?

With the service names. Open the template and your services page side by side and make the names match, word for word. Team members and numbers come next.

Who should own the shared fact file?

One person, usually whoever sends proposals. Even then, we'd give a second person access, so the file survives a vacation or a job change.

Rebuild the buyer pages first and let the blog wait

A rebuild doesn't have to land all at once. Start with the pages a procurement team opens first, and let the blog and the archive follow in a second round.

Can we redesign in stages instead of all at once?

Yes. Services and people usually go first, since a buyer opens those before anything else, and the blog and the rest follow later. That gets the pages that matter in front of buyers sooner.

Which pages count as buyer pages?

Services, people, the vendor-ready page and your case studies. Those answer what a procurement team wants to know before a first call. News, events and older posts can wait for round two.

Do we need a custom design to look credible to big companies?

You need a clear one. Big-company buyers want answers fast, and a tidy layout with honest, specific pages gives them that. Clever animation won't answer a single question on their checklist.

Can you work alongside our marketing coordinator?

Yes, and we like it when someone on your side owns the site day to day. We'll set them up with their own login and show them how to change hours, add a page and swap a photo.

Whoever builds your new site, go in with the keys list and a sorted month of form messages from this guide. Those two things make any redesign easier to run and easier to judge. They also keep the project yours, from the first draft to the day the old site switches off.

Want a hand with any of this? Our first strategy call costs nothing, and nobody leaves it owing anything. Together we'll walk through the site you have and talk about who your buyers are. Then we'll say plainly whether you need a full redesign or a few focused fixes.