Website Design Process
GETTING STARTED
Here’s a good way to get your creative juices flowing to start pulling together your website—
- Create an outline of what you want your website to say, the information you want to provide to your potential customers.
- Collect URLs (web addresses) of sites you like (for their color scheme, layout, theme, etc.), preferably of businesses similar to yours.
- Write the content — flesh out your outline. It doesn’t have to be a lot—people don’t want to read essays; just the necessary details.
- Collect photos to be included. You might need to take product photos or hire a photographer to take them, if you haven’t already. If you have quite a few, copy them to a thumb drive or use DropBox to make them accessible. Optionally, stock photography sites such as istockphoto.com offer low cost stock photos.
- Think about and write down your keywords—what keyword phrases will people search on to find your website. Keep your keywords in mind when writing your content. We will want to include them in the page titles, headings and body copy to help search engines index your site most effectively.
Download the Getting Started PDF
Download my Guide to SEO
WHAT WE DO
You’ve heard the saying “Form Follows Function.” Well, we believe it’s true and we apply that philosophy to the websites we design. We can’t determine what the site will look like until we know what it will contain and how it needs to function. So we work with our clients to understand their needs so that their website will effectively communicate their products and/or services.
The list below outlines the steps involved in our systematic approach to designing the best site possible to meet our clients’ needs.
- Analyze client’s goals and objectives
- Determine best solution to meet needs and budget
- Collect content — text, existing images from client
- Creative process begins — develop look and feel (theme-dependent for WordPress)
- Client approves design
- Build site
- Upon client approval, site goes “live”