How We Do It
Every stage of our web design process lends itself to the next, so projects go through a natural progression with a number of opportunities for you to review the work and request changes before signing off.
Each stage of the process lends itself to the next stage
STAGE 1: KICK OFF MEETING
We begin with a meeting to discuss your business, your competitors, your offering, and your goals. We prefer to do this in person, but we can arrange a phone call if necessary. The information from this meeting forms the basis for our research and the information that you will have on your website. This is your chance to tell us exactly what you want on the site, who your customers are, and why they come to you rather than the competitors. We’ll take that information and make sure it’s reflected across your website and other digital platforms.
STAGE 2: RESEARCH
Our promotions team uses the information from the kick off meeting to research your online market, what people are searching for, and how you should respond to their searches. We use a range of online tools and competitor research to find the right phrases and the right structure for your site.
This is an essential part of our process – it ensures you have the best foundation for your SEO and a site that works around your users’ expectations.
STAGE 3: ARCHITECTURE
The information found in our research is developed further and presented as a site map. This has very little bearing on your overall design, but it’s a crucial process that decides the structure of your site. We typically build an ‘ideal’ site at this stage – if you do not have the time or the budget to complete all of the copywriting necessary, we may suggest paring it down to a smaller launch site so that you can add more pages as part of your ongoing SEO work.
We also provide you with a schedule for your site build with a launch date. There are a number of deadlines built into the schedule to ensure that everything runs on time.
STAGE 4: WIREFRAMING
Once you have approved the architecture, our team creates some wireframes for the design. These are simple outlines of the home page and internal pages to show where different elements will go. The colours and visuals are added at a later stage.
We may not always show a wireframe – some clients prefer us to go straight to the designs to save time and give them a better idea of what the final site will look like.
STAGE 5: DESIGN
Once you have signed off on the wireframes, we start working on the design mock ups which provide an exact layout for your website. Our designers create the homepage first, and only create the internal pages once you have agreed on the homepage design. You can make as many updates as you’d like to the homepage – we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee on this work and change it as many times as we need until it’s just right (and you sign off). Once that’s done, we use the homepage as the basis for the internal page designs.
STAGE 6: DEVELOPMENT & COPYWRITING
Our developers start to build the site when the designs have been signed off. Once we’ve got to this stage, you should really get started on writing the copy for your site (if you haven’t done that already) – it means that you’re more likely to get the copy done without causing delays to the rest of the website work. If you don’t have anybody in-house who has the time and ability to write SEO-optimised copy, we offer a copywriting service that works alongside your development so that your site can launch on time.
STAGE 7: ON-SITE SEO
It’s essential that your site has a good foundation for your SEO – that’s why we manually update the metadata for every single website that we launch. This ensures that your site will be presentable when it appears in search and improves its chances of ranking.
A lot of digital agencies don’t do this as standard, but we understand the importance of ranking and the impact that good metadata can have on your search presence.
STAGE 8: APPROVAL
Your website is built on a test environment so that you can see how everything works together before approving it for launch. There are rarely any issues at this point because the design and copy have all been signed off so it’s just a final check before launch.
STAGE 9: LAUNCH
Your site goes live!
STAGE 10: TRAINING & ONGOING SUPPORT
We don’t just disappear when your site is up and running. We offer training to ensure that you can make updates to your site and understand how it works. You will also go through a snagging process, where we make sure that your site is exactly as you want it.
You can also speak to us about a range of support options to improve your rankings and keep your site in excellent condition. These include:
- Regular healthchecks, where we check your site at regular intervals to fix any content issues or debug
- Ongoing SEO, where our team creates content and builds out your site to improve rankings
- Social media packages, where we create and implement social media strategies
