Website
Design

Tacoma Web Designer

We’re experienced custom website designers and developers. But we're not just about the technology; as designers and marketers, we take the time to understand your goals, audiences, and brand, creating one-of-a-kind online experiences. (Note: you're using one right now!)

Free Account Review

Our Strategic Process

Icon: Discovery Process

1 · Discover

Exploration is about listening, absorbing, distilling, and defining. This is about you!

Icon: Development Process

2 · Develop

This is where it gets fun. We turn our creativity on to produce big ideas.

Icon: Delivery Process

3 · Deliver

Here, we polish the assets, send them out into the world, and start data collection.

Icon: Refinement Process

4 · Refine

As assets go out, we track engagement and provide insights and analysis.

Custom Web Design Services

The promise of easy development and maintenance often fails to materialize with off-the-shelf website formats like WordPress and Squarespace. Over the years, we've found that business owners are better at running their businesses than building websites.

Can you create a WordPress website?

WordPress is the most popular website design and development platform globally. We can and do build template websites when clients prefer it. We understand that staying with a familiar system has some appeal. However, our preference is to build custom websites using our highly intuitive Content Management System (CMS).

Why custom website design?

As creatives, we don't like having to shoehorn a cool vision into a pre-existing template. Something always gets sacrificed in this process. We’re custom designers and developers. So, the only limits to what we can build are your budget and our imagination. Our specialty? Easy-to-use, content-managed sites with completely custom web design. Tacoma has been turning to Hemisphere Design for website innovation since 2001.

Our web design capabilities

Our talented Tacoma website design team has a proven process for creating enterprise-level websites on a reasonable schedule and competitive budget. In addition to custom website design and development, we offer:

Website Exploration

  • Stakeholder interviews (one-on-one, group)
  • Focus groups (target audiences, staff, etc.)
  • Surveys (NPS, brand sentiment, etc.)
  • Competition review and analysis
  • Current asset review and analysis
  • User Interface (UI) evaluation
  • User Experience (UX) evaluations
  • Heatmapping and scroll-depth analytics
  • Google Analytics review

Website Content Strategy

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Content writing
  • Strategic site organization
  • Strategic page design
  • Website photography (WEBP)

Custom Website Design

  • Brand colors, fonts, and elements
  • Custom home page design
  • Responsive page layouts
  • Mobile-friendly approach
  • Landing page design
  • Website graphics (SVG) and icons

Brand Implementation

  • Secure website hosting
  • SSL certificates
  • Ongoing website support
  • Website training

Accessible Web Design

We believe your new website should be accessible to everyone. This approach to web design is central to our custom website development process.

Color Contrast: Ensuring legibility of text, icons, and graphics often requires attention to fonts, size, and color contrast.

Reading Level: We often write to a fifth grade reading level to accommodate non-native English readers and broad audiences.

Video Captions: For those with hearing impairments (and those scrolling social media on mute), captions help deliver the message.

Assistive Devices: Not everyone accesses media with the same tools, so recognizing how alternate devices work is key to our development.

Chart: Accessible Web Elements

Hierarchical Tags: Pages should be organized within a system of heading tags to help users quickly scan the page contents.

Disabilities: Hearing, vision, cognitive, and physical disabilities must be recognized when designing online experiences.

Organization: Properly structuring a website and the content on each page is key to enhancing user experiences.

Navigation (UX): Intuitive navigation systems allow people of all abilities to quickly find your content.

Code is beautiful. With formatting like poetry, expression like prose, and the mystery of a foreign language, we love creating great code.

Mobile-first Design

Smart phone showing a mobile website

As more internet users access the web from mobile devices the importance of responsive design has grown. Today, smart phones account for 63% of global web traffic. For some websites, over 90% of their traffic is mobile.

By focusing on smaller screens and slower speeds, we are able to develop an intuitive, streamlined experience for a broad range of users.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combine the reach of the web with the capabilities of apps, offering features like offline functionality, push notifications, and the ability to be installed on a device’s home screen

 

Common Questions


Expect no sales pressure. Expect to be guided through a thoughtful process by a team of experts. Expect to be heard. Expect proactive communication and minimal drama. Expect us to dress like designers (hoodies and the like) but work like professionals. Expect a custom look you'll love and features that fit your needs. Expect to collaborate. Expect to have a great time. Expect to work together again in the future because great experiences deserve a repeat.

 


We get it. Cost is a part of finding the right web design partner. So what does website design cost? With Hemisphere, we take your goals, needs, and budget into consideration and provide you with a customized proposal. A small website with great design but modest technology needs could cost as little as $5,500. A large, enterprise website with robust technology could cost $25,000 or more. We are happy to find the right budget to meet your organization's needs.

 


We’re not just experts in web design. Tacoma is our home too. We’re uniquely qualified to help local businesses reach their target audience because…we are your target audience. Need to play in a bigger sandbox? No problem, we’ve handled web development projects for corporate giants like SAP and Russell Investments. And with competitive hosting and responsive support, it’s a comfort to know that your site’s in great hands — just down the street.

 

Free Account Review
Illustration: Downtown Tacoma skyline