We strive to make our development process as simple as possible so everyone gets a feel for where we are at any given time.
1. Learn about you and your business
We start by having you provide us with all the details of how your business works. If a business plan is available, the first few sections are usually perfect for this as they often include bios on the owners, clearly written descriptions of the company’s purpose and vision as well as how your revenue model works when it’s at its best. Failing the existence of a business plan, we set up a telephone conference or in-person meeting to have you describe how your business works. The key here is to get a feel for what it is like being in your shoes for a day or two. In doing so, we get a better idea of what we can do with your website to lighten your workload. Often this includes placing an effective call-to-action on your homepage for your key products or services. In some cases it might be integrating your entire product catalogue with your website or synchronizing employee calendars through one central store. Whatever the case, we’ve got built in functionality or plug-ins to integrate that will get the job done.
2. Provide design options that match you and your business
Anyone can find a random website template and roll with it, but finding a template that matches the look and feel of your business can be extremely difficult. We sift through dozens of template sites and thousands of templates to find the right matches for you. These matches often include a heavily customized administration panel developed specifically for your industry with a needs-work design; or it could be the opposite, an awesome design to match the style of your business, but something we need to hack at the code to make it fit with the plans we’ve got in mind for your site.
When we’ve agreed on a template that you love, we’ll tally up all the sections that require content. This way we get an approximate list of pages, posts and other sections that will be considered your complete website (at least for the initial development). We need to be sure that we can completely fill-out the template with your company branding and content.
3. You sign up, we start developing
If you have opted for our professional copy writing services, we will have you send over any images and promo material beyond what we’ve already gathered from the first phase and set our public relations expert to work on formatting your content for your new website. If you would prefer to write the copy yourself, we’ll send over a list of items that must be filled. This includes pages, articles, testimonials, promos, maps, projects, case studies and whatever else might be required to completely fill out your new website.
Now that we’re ready to get started we’ll have you create your account with us and complete your first payment. We will make sure that your brand merges perfectly with the selected theme and that all necessary integrations are completed. If requested, you can login to our project management systems and follow along with us as we overhaul existing code, change the facade, integrate new code and get your new website ready to launch. This normally takes one week to complete at most, excluding any custom development add-ons and, of course, any delays in receiving content.
4. Rock and Roll!
We go over any requested final adjustments and launch the site! At this point we like to discuss any plans we might have for future additions to the site. We get pretty involved with the businesses of our clients, so while we’re hashing different portions of the site out, we often come up with some new ideas for how you can improve your sales, bring in more visitors, or improve the overall process flow of the website. Although you don’t want these changes to hold up development of the site, they’re often great additions to be completed at a later date. In many cases these add-ons include advanced social media integration, an e-commerce system, or even customized modules made just for you. Take a look over our add-ons found on the right side of the package page.
