Website Design
Our website designs are custom built with features necessary to increase SEO, customer engagement and client usability. The process of building your new website is clear, straightforward and interactive from start to finish. Each website we create is custom developed on the WordPress CMS platform, a powerful Custom Management System that allows for easy update to your content, blog entries and social media apps. WordPress also provides increased optimization for your search engine ranking and manageability tools for eCommerce products.
Our approach ensures that there’s a strategic plan in place for achieving your business goals while establishing visibility and accountability along the way. From start to finish, you will be fully incorporated with progression of your website’s development.
1. Discovery
We ask key questions about the goals for your website before we dive in, including questions about your target audience, copy writing needs, features on the site, timing and budget.
2. Project Outline
Once we know more about your ideal website, we will create a proposal that outlines the necessary steps to reach those goals. The proposal will contain our suggestions for creating the best website possible while keeping your budget in mind.
3. Project Assets
We will need logo files and other company material to ensure consistency in branding. We also want to make sure you are on a secure hosting platform. We work with a wide variety of hosting providers and will help to find the one that fits your needs. We’ll take care of the details for you, but keep everything in your name so that you have full control when we turn the site over to you. If you already have hosting, we can most likely work with it and not disrupt that area of your business.
4. Strategy
In order to strategically position the content on your website for your target audience, we’ll conduct necessary phone and email interviews with company leaders to define the audience. After which, we will draft the company story and key messages in a comprehensive document. We call this the “messaging platform,” and it will have uses far beyond the website.
5. SEO
During this optional step, we conduct an audit of current website content, competition, keywords, links, technical elements and analytics. We will then create an SEO and Content Strategy plan based on the findings, and define goals, identify keywords and connect these keywords to website pages/blog posts.
6. Site Map
Before we begin designing, we will work with you to create an outline of all the pages that need to be included on the site. This outline will not only provide a hierarchy of all pages but also a description of what should be on each of those pages. This will help us to better refine the user experience on the site and will help the copywriter begin to craft copy that is optimized for each specific page.
7. Content Writing & Review
Once we have established which pages need to be included on your site, we will collect content for each page. This includes text for all the pages as well as any images that need to be used throughout the site. The copy can either be provided by you or from our copywriter. Keep in mind our copywriters know how to best write for the web, so you will see better results by using an expert!
8. Site Wire Frame
With the site map completed and copy writing under way, we begin work on the layout of the site. In this phase, we create wireframes, which are essentially a skeleton of the site without graphics or copy. Each wireframe will be created with usability and your goals in mind. You will have the opportunity to review several layouts and pick one that resonates with you.
9. Design
Once a wireframe is chosen, we begin wrapping the wireframe in a design. This is when the site really starts coming together. You will have the chance to review the design, provide input on changes, and approve the graphics before we move on to programming.
10. Develop
Once the design is approved, there’s one more step before the site is an official part of the Internet — development. This phase takes all the work we’ve done to create a great look and feel and makes it interactive using the latest technologies including HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript and more.
11. Review
Once the development process is complete, you will have access to a working version of your site for live testing and review. In this phase we make final changes and tweaks to the content and layout before flipping the switch to go live!
12. Launch
With your site built and tested, the next step is to make it live for the world to see! We’ll activate your site, and put in a good deal of time to ensure everything is perfect from the images on your home page to the redirects inside your server. Attention to detail is crucial at this step, and our years of experience will help to make sure everything goes smoothly.
13. Train
We believe in providing you with the resources you need to understand your own website. You can choose to have an in-person two-hour training session with our WordPress experts or opt for a virtual session to teach you the ins and outs of WordPress.
14. Maintenance
It’s important to remember that a website is never complete. There is traffic to be monitored, optimization strategies to consider and content to keep current. We offer services to manage the pieces of ongoing website management and would be happy to discuss those options with you based on your goals.