Sonni Web
- Your business needs a modern, high performing website that your users and google love.
- Your business needs a go-to strategic online partner to handle your web needs.
BUT…
Finding a qualified and reliable resource to properly build, maintain and care for your entire web environment– from hosting to website updates and all the confusing stuff in between – is difficult.
Reliable, High Standard Web Solutions
Sonni Web developed as a solution to the problems our clients faced before they started working with us.
Every website that came our way was in poor shape, semi-dysfunctional, not mobile friendly or SEO optimized, buggy, and built in a way that made changes a messy ordeal. Their budget hosting was also not serving their website – their online business goals – well, either. Naturally, often these issues are unknown to the client. Their previous web resource got the job done on the surface without caring about the long-term consequences of their work. All wasted cost and wasted sales, goals, and conversion opportunities.
These hired resources didn’t provide the client with a partner who genuinely cared about the success, performance and longevity of their online business.
Clients were finding “hired hands” that did not provide actual value.
…and
we can relate!
[enter: real talk]
We too were done working for agencies that simply didn’t know what they were doing, had low caliber knowledge and standards. It’s common for businessess to hire resources that give inaccurate, outdated or simply wrong information and “expertise”. It bothered us not only on an ethical level, but also how inadequate these expensive outcomes were. Bad tech, bad taste, bad user experience, applying old practices, etc…
Businesses often leave web service agencies, and usually unsatisfied.
Agencies are often a mess to deal with unless you have the six figures to invest in a top-notch agency. Bloated processes, ineffective old ideas, and surprise pricing among other causes are the reason agencies notoriously have a high churn rate.
Our client stay with us year after year.
Our holistic service and high-touch, proactive care provides
long term value for your business.
We are best suited for the client that is:
- Looking for a comprehensive and custom web environment solution.
- Wanting premium tech, service, knowledge sets, a sharp designer’s eye, and reliability.
- Understands the value and efficiency in doing things well – from the art to the science.
- Knows there’s a higher cost to doing things poorly.
Businesses also don’t have time – nor should invest time – to become part-time website troubleshooters or freelancer recruiters. It’s frustrating, time consuming and a rarity to find a strategic online partner. Sonni Web takes care of your website and web environment so you can stop burning resources and focus on what YOU do best.
3 main reason why your website can become problematic, ineffective and financially wasteful:
- your developer, designer and/or the bad advice and opinions you implement.
- your web hosting
- the lack of proper website maintenance.
They’re also the 3 key players to a website’s success!
- We provide a time-saving and seamless solution to handle all three of these aspects with care and high standards.
Just like how it would be ideal to have a strategic partner for your car maintenance – someone who knew how to source the best and most fair car mechanic out there, so that you don’t keep going to a dishonest/under-skilled mechanic that will have you coming back year after year for unnecessary cyclical problems.
“Ensure web work is done right the first time, or waste time and money later.”
This is the lesson many people learn when they navigate the complex world of web development. Sonni Web is the solution to this common problematic scenario, and provides clients with a one-stop solution for a smooth, efficient, reliable process for their website needs, from the foundational tech to what the user experiences.
A website is a big investment, and it needs to be an investment that serves you well long term.
This means ensuring the 3 key players to a successful website are maintained in top shape 24/7 by pros!
Let Sonni Web give you peace of mind by covering your business website hosting, technical maintenance, design/build if needed, and ongoing engagement with site updates and care. Complete web care in one spot.
We specialize in high performing, SEO focused web hosting and technical maintenance with boutique level care, and we specialize in modern, effective websites that convert. That means no clutter, no amateur graphics or bad taste that distract from the message or annoy the user. A polished, modern, sophisticated website that has a clear goal is the best way to communicate to your target audience. Today’s web user is picky with high standards, and our work reflects a higher expectation.
Why Sonni Web Services
What is a holistic approach and why does it matter?
The short answer is:
all of these below services are needed for a problem-free, successful website that your users (conversions) and google (ranking) love.
It is best that they are all managed by a high-standards, cohesive, unified system – us!
With a holistic service that designs, builds and manages a web environment from top to bottom, your business benefits from a stable, high performing and healthy web presence that your target audience and google loves. Our high-touch proactive care and expert technical and creative resources provide long term value for your business.
I’ll first need to start off by walking you through the experience you will have, or already had, in setting up, building, and running a website. Especially if you’ve gone through that messy journey, you will understand the value in a holistic service that handles it all with care and expertise.
Doing things right the first time, saving you time and money in the long term.
From the foundational tech to the user experience, our holistic approach covers the pillars to a successful website. Typically these areas are handled by separate providers creating friction, a confusing web environment to manage, higher costs, lower performance, and not knowing who to turn to when you need help across these platforms. We built this service as a comprehensive solution after many years observing the same problems and missed opportunities businesses face across their website environment.
You will need these pillars properly and accurately in place to successfully run a website:
- Managed web hosting +
- hosting-side technical maintenance +
- website-side technical maintenance +
- skilled web design and development +
- having a pro web resource on hand for ongoing management of all of the above.
Skipping over the computer science of it all, you will need web hosting, your domain name connected to that hosting, and your website connected to your hosting and domain name. Cheap hosting providers like GoDaddy make it sound easy and claim they will walk you through it. Over a decade of experience with these hosting and web providers, I can tell you that whatever hand holding/one-click service they offer is a nightmare to deal with, it’s incomplete which causes problems immediately and down the road, and their poor tech and service level is a significant disservice to your website, your time and money. Every client we’ve worked with had trouble navigating this area and we inevitably had to fix the configurations of these elements.
It’s starting you off on the wrong foot.
And that’s just the beginning of the journey in running a business website. After that’s all set up, the website needs to be built well and for the long-term, and regularly managed. Achieving this is an art and science and requires comprehensive knowledge, smart taste, and experience in knowing what works.
Setting up, building, and managing these core pillars is best left to the experts. It’s more complicated than marketing tells you. Do you know how to properly set up DNS, point nameservers, MX records, create SPF records for your business email, how to add the various DNS verification records from email marketing to google, set up Google Console, properly set up security measures, add reCaptcha to avoid spam, setup auto-renew and free SSL, test and deploy a PHP update so it doesn’t break your site, fix broken plugins, what to do if your site breaks, etc.?
If handled incorrectly by a novice (often you or the freelancer you hired…heck, we’ve seen agencies fall into this category), there’s endless pitfalls, time-consuming setups and configuration, roadblocks, and many accidental and expensive bad decisions made. Half are known up-front, the rest of the bad-decision-fallout sprinkles in over time. Always costing you more than the cost of doing it right in the first place.
Let’s get your business website on the best track to success from the beginning. This means having a strategic online partner and pro like Sonni Web handle it.
Why Managed Hosting?
Managed hosting means this service is high touch and your web hosting is being monitored, maintained and updated 24/7. Your hosting and website are one in the same, so hosting care is just as important as website care. Either both are great, or both are not.
Great hosting is the foundation to a successful website. The features that great hosting provides are what Google cares about first and ranks the heaviest: load time, performance, compression measures, etc. All hosting-side features. Most people don’t know that. Web hosting is a commercial big-box, quantity over quality system. As such, you easily get poor service and out-dated tech for the price. You don’t escape the economic reality that you get what you pay here. Cheap hosting is making a cheap decision towards your business, and it will pay for it. One example is throttling. Cheaper hosting has limits, and when you reach those limits, they slow your site down. Very common yet not well known unless you understand hosting lingo and specs. This usually plays out when you have a surge in traffic, maybe you received press or are having a sale. So right when you need your site to perform the best so you don’t loose conversions and opportunities, your site slows down and users leave. Likewise, you could have a plan where you are charged for that surge. Often hosting charges on a scale of visitors or some other data point that makes your growth more and more expensive. Our hosting provides more resources when you need it, not less, and for the same price.
There’s also significant technical setup involved. The myriad of DNS records, nameservers and such I mention above. These need to be configured accurately otherwise your website simple won’t work. Your third party apps, email service, SSL, and google registration to name a few, will also need to be correctly added to DNS. There’s also different hosting specs you’ll want to ensure you have based on your site needs. An ecommerce site will have different hosting needs than say a video heavy website, so knowing what’s what with this is important. We handle all of this.
There’s also ongoing technical maintenance involved. SSL renewals, script updates, high-touch PHP testing and deploy to name a few. We handle all of this.
All of these above things need to be done accurately and be maintained otherwise your site won’t work. Our hosting service takes off your hands the messy world of server-side/hosting management and makes smart decisions and maneuvers in this area.
Why Website Design, Build and Deploy?
We specialize in modern, effective, attractive websites that convert. That means no clutter, no amateur graphics or bad taste that distract from the message or annoy the user. A polished, modern, sophisticated website that has a clear goal is the best way to communicate to your target audience.
Today’s web user is picky with high standards, and our work reflects a higher expectation.
We’ve streamlined the web design and development process and provide higher visibility and choice into a process that’s normally obscure. We also build in a way that maintains flexibility so your website can grow with you. Websites are usually built “in cement” making it an expensive project to change even small things. Unfortunately this is a scenario that developers conceal, and clients soon realize they cannot easily edit their website as expected. Our process allows your website to be as fluid and adaptable as you need.
A website sets a visual and functional tone for your business. If it’s easy to navigate, polished, professional, user-friendly, and well done, then your customers will think that about your business as a whole. Users will go with the more modern, upscale site as it conveys trustworthiness and authority. This is what we achieve. It’s a first and lasting impression that really matters!
We often offer a fixed price. Our pricing reflects the value of results and our expertise, not just labor and hours. This is a unique value-centric feature of Sonni Web. Over the years we realized this is better for both sides, as it allows us to invest the deep time and scope flexibility needed, and gives you high visibility and certainty, removes your risk of surprise costs and fluctuations, and allows both of us to focus on what matters. With other developers or agencies, you usually get a quote and it ends up costing a multiple of that. Our fixed price gives you peace of mind.
If you already have a website, we do a comprehensive website audit and apply website-side improvements to get your site up to our high standards. This could be image and assets compression, scripts optimization, minification, caching, missing on-page SEO elements, fixing poor content structure, having an accurate sitemap, deleting unnecessary or known problematic plugins, etc. Websites always come our way in awful shape and there’s a lot of work to be done. If your website is not repairable, we will suggest rebuilding since that’s more cost effective and prudent long term.
Our Aesthetic Perspective
The web world gets the benefit of large data to learn from: What do users like, how does our brain and eye work on the web, how does our psychology respond, user psychographics, how does color, scale, space and visuals shape our experience, what does google like, what works best on phone, etc. There’s an objective side to web design and how we experience the web – what’s literally effective (the science), and what’s attractive (the art), and the beauty and skill is knowing how to blend the two. A quick answer is to say that websites perform best when they are simple (because mobile dominates), polished and professional, easy to navigate with clear call to actions, and every feature is intentional, consistent and serves the user.
Our skillset lies in this broad spectrum of multi-disciplinary principles to bring our clients effective and fantastic websites that elevate the communication and feeling towards their brand and business.
Why Website Technical Maintenance?
Websites slowly break or are hacked due to lack of proper maintenance, resulting in a high repair cost. Websites can incur cyclical, unnecessary costs due to using cheap contractors that cause more problems than fix. A website is a long term commitment of regular upkeep. We offer clients an inclusive package of a smart, high standard foundation, maintenance and care for their website so their investment is in good hands for the long term. Our service is our zone of genius, so that you can focus on yours.
What It Is
Regular technical maintenance is required for the health, security, and performance of your website. Marketing-speak makes people think good websites are a set-it-and-forget-it thing nowadays, but they aren’t, they are still living technical structures of computer science, and they still require technical and programming work responsibility to keep them running.
Programming scripts, programming languages, plugins and apps are always upgrading and changing asynchronously. These need to be monitored, upgraded and worked on to maintain cohesion between all these individual moving parts. The amount of work required monthly varies based on the complexity and needs of these elements. Ecommerce websites require the highest attention to maintenance and the consequences of not maintaining ecommerce properly can spread to your payment providers red flagging you, and problems with other apps your business relies on. Also that level of user data requires your site to maintain excellent security measures which requires ongoing work.
Forgoing website maintenance will inevitably result in the degradation of your website. This will reflect as Google docking you SEO points for failing performance and security standards; users leaving your site due to slowness, bugs, and things not working properly; loss of online sales; and eventually your site will either be broken into or hacked – both very expensive problems to fix, often resulting in the need to completely rebuild your website.
We proactively monitor our websites 24/7 and apply measures and update work to ensure things stay running smoothly. We are also alerted as soon as something needs our attention, and many aspects of maintenance and monitoring are automated by our system.
What It Is Not
Technical maintenance does not constitute website content updates or website work such as adding or updating copy, images, or other “web development / web designer” category work. This is strictly backend maintenance. Think of technical maintenance as a silent, behind the scenes partner.
A small simple example is social media plugins. Example: displaying your instagram feed on your site with an Instagram plugin. This plugin connects to the Instagram app through an API and allows your feed to be shown by a consent you give. This API is often updated and when that happens we need to re-sync the plugin with Instagram otherwise your feed won’t show anymore. This requires keeping an eye on this and knowing how to re-connect the two, and knowing how to troubleshoot when it doesn’t work.
Let’s follow through with this scenario of your Instagram feed not showing on your website anymore. Now what? Maybe you spend a few hours googling how to fix it, but unless you’re comfortable working in WordPress Admin and this particular plugin, you’re going to need help. Now you’re spending multiple days on freelancer sites like UpWork looking for someone to fix this, reading through profiles, not hearing back in a timely manner, maybe messaging a few contenders figuring out how long it will take and how much it will cost. They’ll need a login to your website (do you know how to create a user account for them?) and Instagram, so trust and discretion is a factor. Etc, etc.
You run a business! You don’t have time to divert to website troubleshooting or freelancer recruitment, so the whole above process is ridiculous for you to do, and a complete waste of your valuable time. And this example reflects the troubleshooting motions for just one small “easy” problem.
This is a small example but one that shows the level of attention that is constantly needed to ensure your website is working well and up to the standards your users expect. Ongoing maintenance is the type of work you’ll want to hand off to the pros.
Why Long Term Care & Support?
Maintain a high standard and ensure longevity with your website investment. We offer retainer plans to ensure a strategic partner is on hand taking care of your website. Offering website work, consultation, expertise and insights.
No more burning resources looking for quality help and results when you need it.
Our retainer plans can also include valuable monthly insights we share with you in an easy to understand way. Insights like full spectrum analytics, expert SEO audits, to heat maps so you can better understand your users behavior and make informed decisions and smarter investments towards your web presence. A retainer ensures our continued engagement and partnership, and gives us more resources to perfect the many layers of your site and online business goals – improving the macro and micro elements.
Web work also doesn’t do well with shifting hands – it’s too complex and costly technical debt builds up. Before you know it, the backend of your site is a mess, slowing down your site, and making even small programming tasks difficult to do. It’s best to keep the same cook in the kitchen who knows the efficient ins and outs.
Another reason to stick with Sonni Web as your strategic online partner:
We’ve seen this a lot and warrants a discussion here, even though I empathize that it can be hard to grasp from the client’s perspective: A website starts out great, only to be degraded by the well-meaning client and the resources they chose to trust. We’ve seen some awful doozies. How does this happen? The blunt, honest answer is because they are following bad ideas and advice. This scenario is a common topic of conversation and Medium articles – both humorous and agitating – in the web professional world. We all have plenty of stories to share.
One of the many reasons we developed our service ecosystem is because of the flooded, anyone-can-join market of sub-par standards and skills, entities that sell services yet lack real industry knowledge and just plain bad work that was finding its way to well-intentioned clients. Navigating the web industry to find a resource that knows about effective web experience and the comprehensive multi-disciplinary knowledge sets that go into that, is to navigate blind unless this is your expertise.
We empathize with clients and their unintended misdirection in hiring their friend who “does content marketing”, or is convinced by an SEO agency to redo their website (their core competency is Sales and confusing jargon not SEO, is an argument I’ll save for another day), because how are they to know what’s good and what’s not. Over the years, we’ve consistently observed disappointment and pointless paid work from our clients as they hire the next person/entity that promises them this, or say they specialize in that. It takes experience and industry knowledge to know how to sift out the good from the bad and hire correctly, and seek actual good advice. Most are bad, guaranteed. We can help you navigate that.
The delimiter is competency, quality and relevance. We do indeed work with other web entities associated with our client’s portfolio, because it’s a smart relationship or a preexisting relationship that we knew we could contribute to. But we are cautious in implementing work/suggestions/opinions coming from an entity that our client sourced, because again it takes breadth of industry knowledge to know how to source properly. And frankly, we don’t want to ruin our good work. It takes a lot of experience to say it usually degrades outcomes for both sides.
It’s why we see Sonni Web as your strategic online partner, because navigating the web world and discerning good web advice is not your zone of genius, nor should it be, you have other important things to do. But rest assured that it is ours.
Let us bring our eclectic experience with online business, tech, design, strategy, current SEO, effective UI, Pro web apps and tools, conversion flows and more to your online business.
And the Results?
With a holistic service that manages a web environment from top to bottom, your business benefits from a stable, high performing and healthy web presence that your target audience and google loves. Our high-touch proactive care and expert technical and creative resources provide long term value for your business.
Money saved. Time saved.
Peace of mind knowing your complete website and web environment is being taken care of by pros. No more costly web problem surprises disrupting your business, or burning resources looking for help and solutions. Now you have a strategic web partner to advise, manage and build a high quality web presence so you can focus on your business while we protect and maintain your web investment. Now you have a well-done website that elevates your brand for the long term.
and,
It’s Easy!
Our processes, communication and operations are organized, streamlined and well thought out. We communicate clearly with you so you’re always in the loop and part of the process. Switching to our hosting is easy with no down time. Sonni Web focuses on providing long term value and client delight from our outcomes, expertise and delivering a stellar client experience.
Your online business will greatly benefit from our unique approach to full spectrum, high standards website care.
Sonni Web offers an all-inclusive process to design and build your website; keep it in top shape with ongoing maintenance, updates and development work; and provide fully managed web hosting for optimal performance and making your users and google happy. Your complete web environment and web care in one spot.
