Web design is the process of shaping how a website looks, feels, and guides visitors from one page to the next. It combines layout, branding, typography, imagery, navigation, mobile responsiveness, and user experience. For St. Louis businesses, effective web design makes it easier for potential customers to understand the products and services you offer, trust your company, and take meaningful actions.
At its best, website design is able to organize information around customer needs. It helps remove friction and direct users toward making calls, purchases, and appointments. A professional St. Louis web design company can build you a site that also accounts for search engine optimization (SEO), generative AI results, accessibility, page speed, conversions, and the technical requirements needed to support long-term growth and success.
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Want to learn more about how Hexxen can develop the perfect website for your business? Call us today at (314) 499-8253 or reach out online to get started.
See How Hexxen Has Helped St. Louis Businesses
Why Should I Invest in a Website for My Business?
A professional website gives your business a reliable place to explain what you do, build trust, and support your customers. It allows you to turn interest into enquiries, sales, and sustainable long-term growth.
How a website solves your customers’ problems
A website helps customers find answers quickly, compare options, understand your offerings, and take steps toward using your services confidently without waiting for help from someone from your team.
How a website makes your business money
Your website can generate leads, sell products, book appointments, support upsells, and convert existing demand into revenue around the clock, all without the requirement of adding additional staff.
How to justify the cost of a website
A strong website is a long-term business asset. It supports all facets of your business: sales, marketing, recruitment, and customer service. A professional website will help offset its costs across multiple functions over time.
What makes a website better than other platforms
Unlike social media platforms or marketplaces, your website gives you full control over your brand, customer journey, content, data, and conversion strategy without restrictive limitations.
Investing in a website means investing in a stronger digital foundation for your business. With it, you can support your customers, create business opportunities, and grow your brand confidently.
How to Know If You Need a Website (or a Website Redesign)
There’s no set schedule for replacing a business website. Some companies redesign every few years. Others go longer. The better question is whether your current website still supports your customers, marketing, technology, and business goals. Signs that it may be time for a new website or redesign include:
- Declining Leads or Sales — Your website attracts visitors, but fewer of them are calling, submitting forms, making purchases, or taking other meaningful actions.
- Confusing Navigation — Customers struggle to find services, answers, contact information, or other important content without clicking through multiple pages or getting lost.
- Outdate Branding — Your website no longer reflects your current brand, services, positioning, or the level of professionalism customers expect from your business.
- Poor Mobile Performance — Pages are slow, difficult to navigate, or awkward to use on smartphones and tablets, creating unnecessary friction for mobile visitors.
- Broken or Outdated Features — Forms, integrations, links, plugins, or other website functionality no longer work reliably or meet the needs of your business.
If your site is outdated, hard to use, underperforming, or no longer aligned with your business, a redesign is worth considering. And if you don’t have a website yet, building one gives your business a stronger foundation for marketing, customer engagement, and long-term growth.
Hexxen’s Web Design Services Process
Our structured web design process keeps your project focused, collaborative, and aligned with your brand, audience, marketing goals, technical requirements, and long-term growth.
The Six-Step Process
The entire process of building your website—from the agreement phase to the completion phase—takes six steps. These steps have helped build several websites for St. Louis-based companies who have grown to meet and exceed their businesses goals. Here’s how it works:
1. Discovering your brand and audience
We start by learning about your brand, products, services, customers, and business goals. Our team will also review your existing website and technology to identify development needs, potential obstacles, and opportunities (or help shape your vision if you don’t have a website yet).
2. Designing a site built around your brand
After defining your audience and business model, we create true-to-scale website mockups that accurately represent the final user experience. You can review and refine every detail before development begins, giving you the opportunity to implement edits to get the design exactly how you want it.
3. Developing the code that makes it work
Once your team approves the final designs, our developers build the website on a private staging URL. You can review progress throughout development, test the experience, and provide feedback before the site becomes publicly accessible and visible to search engines.
4. Optimizing your website for SEO and AI
An effective website must also be discoverable. We optimize your site for speed, security, mobile usability, search engines, and AI-driven results. Depending on your strategy, this may include local pages, directory listings, profiles, backlinks, structured content, and technical improvements.
5. Delivering your new or updated website
At this point in the process, we complete a detailed launch checklist covering essential design, functionality, and SEO requirements. Once everyone on your team signs off, we launch the site securely through Hexxen hosting or transfer it to your preferred provider.
6. Marketing your site through the right channels
Launching your website is only a milestone. Hexxen can also promote it through organic search, paid social media, local directories, content marketing, and other targeted channels. We also track rankings, traffic, leads, and user behavior to measure performance and guide future improvements.
How Hexxen’s Web Design Builds Can Integrate Into Your Marketing Strategy
A well-designed website should support every part of your digital marketing strategy. Hexxen designs websites as connected marketing platforms, ensuring that their structure, content, performance, and user experience work together. The goal is to help support visibility, engagement, lead generation, campaign performance, and long-term success.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
An SEO-ready website design gives search engines clear structure, fast performance, mobile usability, and organized content that improves visibility for local searches in the St. Louis area. Better visibility creates more opportunities to reach people already looking for what your business offers, turning search demand into qualified traffic, better leads, and a more dependable source of new revenue.
Content Marketing
Strong web design gives content marketing a framework. It makes articles, service pages, videos, case studies, and resources easier for visitors to discover, understand, and navigate. When your content is connected instead of scattered, each piece can lead naturally to the next, helping visitors build confidence in your experience and move closer to making an informed business decision.
AI Search Optimization
AI search optimization helps platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude understand your expertise, services, locations, and authority by presenting information in clear, structured, and context-rich formats throughout every relevant webpage. As more people use AI tools to research options and compare businesses, a well-structured website gives your brand a stronger chance of becoming a part of the answers that shape their decisions.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion-focused design helps turn website traffic into action by strengthening user trust and directing visitors toward calls, purchases, appointments, downloads, quote requests, or form submissions. Even small improvements to that user journey can increase the value of traffic you already have, helping your marketing generate more business without requiring the same increase in advertising spend or visitor volume.
When all of these marketing channels work together with a professionally built, integrated website, you’re left with a smooth customer experience, a lead generation engine, and a centralized hub for promoting and growing your business.
Which Software Do We Use to Create Your Website?
Hexxen selects the right website platform based on your business goals, content needs, ecommerce requirements, integrations, budgets, and growth plans. Our team works across both established content management systems and custom solutions, allowing us the flexibility to build you a website that fits with your operations instead of forcing compromises. Here’s what we use:
- WordPress — WordPress offers flexible content management, extensive customization, easy updates, strong SEO capabilities, and scalability. It’s the engine that runs Hexxen.com.
- Joomla — Joomla supports structured content, advanced permissions, multilingual websites, and flexible extensions for businesses managing complex information or multiple user groups.
- Magento — Magento provides powerful ecommerce tools for large product catalogs, custom checkout experiences, inventory management, integrations, and growth-oriented online sales operations.
- Custom Builds — Our developers use their knowledge of HTML and JavaScript to build tailor-made features to give you complete control over features, workflows, integrations, and designs when a standard platform doesn’t meet your requirements.
We want the software you use to suit your business and work well for you and your customers. With the right engine, your website is easy to manage, simple to update, and ready to grow alongside your business.
Web Design FAQs
How much does professional web design cost in St. Louis?
Professional web design costs vary based on page count, functionality, content, integrations, ecommerce needs, and customization. A simple site will cost less than a complex, fully customized digital platform. Some factors that affect cost include:
- Number of webpages
- Custom design requirements
- Content writing
- Photography and video
- Ecommerce functionality
- Software integrations
- Hosting and maintenance needs
How long does a custom website design project typically take?
A professional website design project may take several weeks or several months. The timeline depends on the site’s size, content requirements, the feedback process, and the approval timeline for the decision makers involved. The length of your build depends on:
- Website size and complexity
- Content needs
- Custom features
- Revision approval and speed
- Third-party integrations
Should my business redesign its website or build a new one?
A redesign may be appropriate when your site has a reliable technical foundation but needs updated branding, navigation, content, or conversion pathways. Larger problems, on the other hand, may necessitate rebuilding the site completely.
We evaluate your site’s design, code, content management system, search performance, and functionality to determine which approach provides better long-term value instead of simply pushing for an expensive rebuild from the start.
What pages should a small business website include?
Most small business sites need pages explaining the company, their services, their service areas, and contact options. The exact structure should be based on customer questions, real search behavior, and your desired results. Common small business webpages include:
- Homepage
- About page
- Individual service pages
- Product or ecommerce pages
- Service area pages
- Case studies or a portfolio
- FAQs
- Contact page
Will my company own its website and design after launch?
With many web design agencies, ownership depends on the agreement between you and the agency. You should understand exactly who owns the site, all of its written content, its images, code, domain, hosting account, and licensed software.
When you use Hexxen for your site build, you own your website. The content, code, images, and video are all created, developed, and implemented by us, but they’re yours forever.
Can Hexxen improve website accessibility for users with disabilities?
Accessible web design helps people with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities navigate and interact with your site. Some common accessibility improvements may address:
- Color contrast
- Keyboard navigation
- Heading structure
- Image alt text
- Form labels and instructions
- Descriptive links
- Video captions
Hexxen reviews design elements to make sure your new or updated website complies with ADA standards. We’ll make sure to consider accessibility throughout the design, development, testing, and maintenance steps of your build.
Build the Perfect Website to Grow Your Business
If your website is outdated, running slowly, not producing the number of leads you need, or if you don’t have a site yet, we’re here to help. Hexxen can plan the entire process from start to finish to build a connected, responsive site that helps drive results.
We can also integrate other essential digital marketing solutions like:
- Video marketing to integrate professional, high-quality videos that hook potential customers
- Google Ads management to drive paid traffic to critical product and service pages
- Search engine optimization to help potential customers find your new or updated site organically
- Web analytics to track the performance of your new or updated site across all marketing channels
If you have questions about designing a new site or updating your existing site, contact Hexxen online or give us a call at (314) 499-8253. We’re ready to build you a website that aligns with your vision for your company’s digital presence and growth goals.
