OUR WORK

Big Website Design

Big Business Wow with Small Biz Bucks
A small budget doesn’t mean you can’t have some beautiful bells and whistles.

Especially for Small Businesses

You’re a small business or nonprofit with big aspirations, and that means you need a great website. After some research, you realize your aspirations outpace your budget.

What should you do?

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Option One

Do it yourself

The first option is to try to do it yourself with a Wix or SquareSpace site, which might take around 40 hours to complete, if you’re really good with websites. However, you’re a smart business owner who knows your DIY website would probably look more amateur than you want for your professional business. Plus, those 40 hours could have been spent on a task within your realm of expertise.

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Option Two

Hire a jack-of-all-trades freelancer

The second possibility is to hire a jack-of-all-trades web designer to handle the strategy, design, programming, copywriting, and project management that all goes into a good website. While there is definitely an abundance of freelancers, they can be flaky, part-time workers who more than likely don’t have sufficient experience or knowledge in all those fields to truly carry your website to its full potential.

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Option Three

Hire a professional website development team

Finally, because even the simplest, yet high quality, small business website requires 20 to 30 hours of work, you can hire a professional website development team like e9digital to bring your vision to life. Your e9 team would include specialists organized by a point person and producer to ensure that your project is completed successfully. While it is a little more expensive than Options 1 or 2, the results are guaranteed, and your aspirations are achieved. Each of e9’s small business clients enjoys 5 core sets of services. Read on to learn the secrets behind their successful small business websites.

In order to offer clients the most value, e9 brings four key services to the table as a partner.

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Project Management

e9 understands the day-to-day demands of running a business, which is why our producer takes the lead with the project’s management, from setting a purposeful working schedule to coordinating the resources to get there. With their finger on the pulse of every project, our producer ensures e9’s teams are equipped with the content and directives they need to achieve the creative direction, while ensuring the project remains on budget and on schedule. Beyond strict project management, e9 crosses every “t” and dots every “i”, from assisting with website launch processes (updating DNS, integrating Google Analytics to the website, setting up proper contact forms, and more), to executing posts launch tasks and proactively managing website maintenance (daily backups of website, WordPress updates, and security patches).

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Creative Direction

e9’s creative team is led by Jina, who brings over 20 years of large agency experience to the table and an impressive portfolio of both major brands, nonprofit organizations, retailers and small businesses. Under her direction, e9 provides clients creative work that properly addresses their target audience in a unique and brand appropriate way. Jina’s hand-picked, talented team ensures the work is cohesive—both visually and content-wise—to create a full website that is a fundamental part of a successful brand.

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Technical Engineers

Once e9 has an idea of what the website should accomplish, the team either custom designs a template (theme) or curates a premium, pre-developed theme – whichever is most appropriate for the client’s goals and budget. Pre-developed WordPress themes are a viable option because they save clients money. They come with many built-in functionalities so programming time is at a minimum. e9’s technical staff first vets these pre-developed themes through a multi-step process that ensures that e9’s standards are met. Because e9’s tech staff are used to building complex custom software for large enterprises, the standards are very rigorous. This means themes are tested for responsiveness across all different browsers and multiple user platforms, checked for bugs in the code, and that the theme’s original developer has good credentials and an impressive portfolio. The tech team also installs the theme with proper demo content to make it more efficient for designers to load content and customize styles. Throughout the course of the project, the tech team works closely with designers and content loaders to offer tech support and guidance.

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Content

When e9 first begins a project, the new client is asked to fill out a comprehensive brand questionnaire to help e9 learn about their business and their goals. 50% of clients can’t finish this questionnaire because it can be difficult to articulate their mission and brand in a marketing capacity. In these instances, e9’s creative team can step in to help define the client’s objectives. Many business owners also find it overwhelming when they actually face the time, knowledge, and writing skills it takes to create 5-10 pages of website marketing copy. A lot goes in to deciding what to write about, how to frame it, how to organize it strategically, and how to implement calls to action. The e9 team can create content strategically per an established creative direction and site map. This creates intuitive navigation and solid organization for the website, dictates calls to action, categories, as well as page or section headers. Some clients have images they want to include in the website, which e9 can color correct or embellish (Photoshop) and then optimize for efficient web display. The team can also curate inexpensive stock photography images to help enhance the content and messaging. e9 also offers ongoing content support. If a client needs to add a table or a page, e9 can upload content or properly optimized images.

No two projects are exactly alike

No two projects are exactly alike, so the team at e9 adjusts their services for each client in order to provide the most beneficial results. The following are examples of how e9’s services can accommodate different scopes of projects, clients, and budgets—and how they may be able to help your business.


Identity, Content Strategy, Custom Website

Gateway Housing is a new nonprofit in NYC. Aligning nicely to New York Mayor DeBlasio’s goal of creating more affordable housing options in NYC, Gateway works to provide ongoing, transitional housing for the homeless. The powerhouse creative team at e9 jumped in to help create a website for this nonprofit. Gateway brought a lot of content to the table: pages and pages of policies, partnerships, and images. Right away, the team set out to develop a content strategy to organize the content and create a logo for Gateway. The photos given to e9 did not evoke the warm, hopeful nature of Gateway Housing’s mission, so editing was done to help the images better tell the brand’s optimistic story. The important details of their policies were organized into sections to make the page more navigable and easier to digest. This also helped turn the policies into a story.


Identity, Custom Website

The blog, Lavish’d, belongs to a strong, passionate, independent blogger named Christina Winks. The e9 team helped Christina rebrand her blog from the more youthful ChristinaWinks.com, to the higher quality, more luxurious, Lavishd.com that better matched her goal for her brand. The new website not only matches her brand, it celebrates her creativity. Rather than choosing a new WordPress theme, e9 inherited an existing theme from a developer that Christina had previously used. The team worked with what was given to them and seamlessly implemented the necessary design changes. In addition to the creation of this website and other marketing materials for Christina’s brand, e9 also offers her ongoing support. The team coaches Christina in how to optimize her images before she posts them to ensure consistency of display. As her brand continues to evolve, e9 is there to help her implement new components and content to her website.


Identity, Custom Website

The Philipose Group (TPG) is a luxury commercial real-estate company based out of New York. TPG relies on e9 for more than just website development and support, but also for more traditional marketing needs. When TPG came to e9 for a new website, there was a lot of content refinement needed to communicate the messaging and story of the brand. TPG had a very good idea of how they wanted their website to function and look visually, and e9 worked closely with them to create a one-page website complete with modern and trendy techniques to make the content stand out. e9 continues to support TPG through traditional marketing materials such as business cards and presentation slides that evoke the high-quality feel of the website and brand.

Ready to get started?

e9digital strives to be a valuable partner to small business clients. Whatever the scope of work, size of business, budget, or timeline, e9 offers a solution. When a small business chooses e9, they choose a partner that wants success for their business as much as they do.

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