Every third startup founder has very strong opinions on design." That's how the majority of San Francisco web designers I interviewed summed up our city's landscape. There's no room for generic - you not only have to design something visually appealing, you have to actually give people a reason to click it more help.
For San Francisco business owners, this isn't a problem limited to design alone, it permeates your entire online presence. This is a city of tech-savvy insiders. San Francisco users understand kerning, they know about mobile first designs, and they can tell when a website feels wrong.
Because they've spent years using polished apps, local San Francisco users pick up on sluggish load speeds. And a generic template just won't cut it.
Why?
Because the people who use your website come from all corners of the city, and a range of factors shapes what they expect.
It's a dental office in the Sunset needing different things from their users than a Series A SASS company in the city's SoMa district.
You may not know this, but great custom websites are built on questions first, design files second. Asking about what a company sells, who buys their products, and why they choose an option over another needs to happen before a single pixel is placed. Skip this critical step, and you're left with an attractive website that simply underperforms.
Local designers here in SF will spend a significant amount of time building the website quickly and will make it a point to act on user feedback in order to produce a user-friendly and fast-loading site. Like the big tech companies here, local designers lean heavily on testing and iteration. Rigid waterfall processes and locked-in mockups are a thing of the past.
Not every San Francisco business owner realizes just how much mobile matters – people are out in the Mission or Hayes Valley browsing on their phones looking at local businesses, deciding within seconds whether the storefront is worth visiting-if the website takes too long to load up on a cellphone, they won't stick around.
While it varies widely, you could easily spend around $5,000 on a website design. With the 5 figure costs associated with more comprehensive website designs-complete with online store functionality, custom effects, or a CMS setup- costs go up fast. The costs of web designers working in San Francisco will typically run higher than the national average since San Francisco's cost of living is steep and this directly impacts designers' prices.