Our website design process was created through our twenty years of experience designing and developing successful websites. Below you’ll find a simple overview to help you better understand our web design process from start to launch and beyond. Naturally, the process may differ in some ways due to each website’s unique requirements.
Getting Started
First, we need to learn your basic requirements, goals, and overall scope of work. We also need to determine that we are a good fit and can truly help you. We'll ask you to complete our Website Project Inquiry, which is your opportunity to explain your vision of what the new website requires and the results you expect. After we receive your inquiry and if believe we are a good fit, we’ll schedule a Zoom call for introductions and answer any questions.
Once we’re crystal clear on the details, we’ll provide a website design proposal detailing your needs and our solution. Your proposal will also include an outline of your project’s phases and the time we estimate needed for each phase.
A simple overview of our process
Onboarding & Discovery
After accepting our proposal and submitting your deposit, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to your project dashboard. Your dashboard includes onboarding documents and storage to upload your website content and images. Everything required for each phase of your project will be here, so we all have easy access.
Your project begins with our Discovery Questionnaire, which helps us learn more about your business to plan our approach and design decisions for creating your website.
After receiving your Discovery Questionnaire, we’ll schedule a kickoff call to have a chat about your answers and content plan. We’ll also review your sitemap, which outlines the exact pages we will create.
Content
Content is a fundamental part of your website development process.
There are several approaches to creating content; you provide all of the content, we bring in our copywriting partner to write the content for you, or hire a 3rd party copyrighter.
Whichever approach we take, it’s critical to have a solid plan for your content creation. It can make or break the project timeline.
Design
Once we have a clear understanding of the website structure and content, we begin working on the visual design.
We’ll present the initial design of the homepage, including the navigation and an interior page layout. We’ll present these mockups using our feedback tool, where you’ll be able to leave comments directly on the design (think digital “sticky notes”).
With your sign off on the initial design, we have the elements in place to create the rest of the pages.
Development
The website development phase actually begins early in the web design process. We set up your WordPress install on our development server and start work on back-end functionality such as forms.
We will build out all of the website pages and functionality during this phase with SEO best practices, and cross-platform and device performance assurance.
Launch
Once you have reviewed and approved the development site, we’ll perform our pre-launch checklist to ensure everything is ready for launch. This includes the website's page speed performance, mobile-friendliness, security, and more (it's a long list). We’ll schedule our launch date and your training for editing the website.
On launch day, we’ll make the site live by migrating the development website to your hosting server.
Post-Launch
For the next 30 days, we will keep a close eye on the website and debug any issues if they arise. If you find something after launch that needs to be changed or added, you’ll have these 30 days to make changes without incurring any additional fees.
After the 30 days, we’ll meet for an assessment to make sure things are running smoothly, and your website care plan will go into effect.