CANNABIS WEB DESIGN
No matter what type of cannabis business you represent, your company needs a website to serve as your digital hub. From boutique growers and medical dispensaries, to cannabis advocates and physicians, your website is how new customers learn about your products and services. Even if all you have listed on your website is your address and phone number, you're providing a digital listing for people to discover you via web searches and social media. And if you already have a cannabis web site but haven't updated it since first launching, there is likely a lot of functionality that you could be capitalizing on to grow your business and build up your customer base.
Web design from The Hood Collective creates a digital hub for your cannabis business that has the ability to scale up with you as you grow. With premium layout and design, sleek functionality, and ease of updates, our web design services make it simple and affordable for your cannabis company to have a professional website that maximizes your online potential. And because our company has been focused exclusively on the cannabis industry since our inception, our team of pro designers, programmers, and copy writers have a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by cannabis businesses. Whether you are narrowly focused on drawing business from you immediate neighborhood, or seek to sell your hemp and CBD products nationwide, we have a solution that fits your ambitions and budget.
HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN WORDPRESS AND WIX FOR YOUR CANNABIS WEBSITE?
When it comes to web design, there are too many options to mention by name. Before deciding which web designer you want to hire, you need to do your homework about the various options and find the one that is right for you. Do you need the absolutely most basic solution that requires the least amount of tech knowledge? Then perhaps Squarespace is the best solution for you. Are you a member organization that has paid subscribers and your web solution needs to be able to manage your membership base as well? Then you probably should look for a designer who's familiar with Wild Apricot.
At The Hood Collection, we offer two options for the platform on which we'll build your website: Wordpress or Wix. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but we believe they offer the greatest benefits in terms of features, flexibility, ease of use, and future expansion. Let's take a quick look at each of those factors individually and give you some background to help you decide which option is right for your cannabis business. And if you'd like to discuss the attributes of each, please don't hesitate to reach out and schedule a free consultation.
In terms of features, because of Wordpress's immense scale and history, there's no doubt that it offers much more in terms of features. Wordpress offers users thousands of both paid and free plugins that provide pretty much any web functionality you can imagine, from a simple age verification drop down to a full-fledged online store. Even better, each feature has numerous options to chose from, meaning that pretty much every thing on your site is customizable. While Wix has gotten to the point where it matches Wordpress in terms of the number of features they offer, they don't have the same amount of variety. For instance, you can only use the Wix commerce app for your online store, as opposed to choosing from hundreds of different e-commerce options on Wordpress. Of course, the sheer amount of flexibility and diversity means that Wordpress can be much more challenging to navigate, and it's much less likely that you'll be able to go in and repair something yourself without prior knowledge of how Wordpress works. With Wix, it's much easier to update or fix something without needing a programming degree.
The same is true in terms of the flexibility of the two platforms. Wordpress has hundreds of regular developers who are constantly creating themes and plugins for users to choose from, many of them free. When building a Wordpress site, there are basically unlimited options in terms of theme. And some of the most popular themes offer so much versatility that developers will use the same theme for every one of their clients without ever repeating the same style. Wix is much more limited in terms of what it can do, but for many users, this is a feature rather than a bug. For owners of small businesses who have zero web design ability, Wix offers an easy to update and edit interface that pretty much anyone can learn in a short amount of time. If you want to hire a web designer to build you a site that you can regular add blog posts, images, videos, or updates to, Wix is the more accommodating option.
In terms of ease of use, beyond the points already mentioned above, one key difference between Wix and Wordpress is how your website will be hosted. With Wix, you can buy your domain name (the URL that people will use to find your website) at the same time you subscribe to their service. They not only provide the platform for designing your site, but they host it as well. With Wordpress, you will have to purchase your domain and find a place to host your website separately. Wordpress just provides the platform for creating the actual site, not for hosting your web content. Both Wix and Wordpress will require monthly or yearly fees. You'll pay a subscription for a Wix site, similar to Squarespace. While the Wordpress platform itself is free, you'll still need to pay annual domain and web hosting fees to a third party company. Both are reasonably priced, but for most small and medium-sized businesses, Wix is easier to manage.
Both sites rank highly in terms of having the ability to expand in the future. For example, perhaps you are a dispensary owner in a state that may be instituting a delivery option in the next few years. You want a simple website now, but one that can have the ability to accept orders and payments in the future when it becomes legal. The great thing about both Wix and Wordpress is it's easy to add new features as desired without requiring a complete overhaul of the site. This is why we prefer Wix and Wordpress over other options, such as Squarespace.
How much does cannabis web design cost? When you hire The Hood Collective as your website designer, you can choose either a Wix or Wordpress website. The cost for a Wix site starts at $1500, while a Wordpress site begins at $2500. If you need additional complex functionality, such as a membership option or e-commerce, the cost will depend on the scope of the project.
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT CANNABIS WEB DESIGN?
At first consideration, it might seem like there's no reason a cannabis business needs to hire a cannabis-specific web designer. But just like every other aspect of the industry, cannabis websites have specific considerations that, while it's not 100% necessary to go with a cannabis web designer, there are some clear advantages to doing so.
For example, your cannabis web site will almost certainly need to have an age verification landing page, that screens out minors from entering your site. If you possess a cannabis license, you'll likely be required by local law to have such a verification process, and need to show that you aren't advertising to users under the age of 21.
But beyond the legal issues, cannabis web design can easily fall into the same tropes and clichés that afflicts many businesses in the industry. So many of the names, logos, and brand styles quickly start to look the same because the marketers and designers that create them only have a surface understanding of the plant and the community around it. A cannabis web designer can ensure your website has a unique and compelling style that doesn't rely on these commonplace stereotypes.
CANNABIS WEB DESIGN AND SEO
All of the websites that we build are designed in a way to maximize your SEO presence. This means we'll build you a site that loads quickly, is structurally sound, and has all of the information in place to make it popular with search engines. Of course, there's so much more to effective SEO than just how you structure your pages and including all the right metadata. If SEO marketing is an important part of your business, you'll need to implement a long term content strategy that prioritizes meaningful video, photographic, and written content that is valuable to your users. But you'll rest easy knowing that a website from The Hood Collective is built with SEO in mind from the very start.
WHY HIRE THE HOOD COLLECTIVE FOR YOUR CANNABIS WEB DESIGN?
At The Hood Collective, our web design and development team is made up of experienced programmers, graphic designers, and copywriters who understand the cannabis industry and excel at what they do. We make the entire web design process as easy as possible, from initial conception to final delivery. We design premium web sites for dispensaries, cultivators, processors, wholesalers, distributors, event companies, CBD retailers, hemp farmers, and more. Best of all, we create web sites that fit seamlessly into your brand style, rather than force you to conform to a ready made template.
Our friendly, talented web designers make the satisfaction of our clients their top priority. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.
