The Website Design Process

The first step in the design process is to gather information. Many things must be considered when developing a website that is customized for your company and for your industry, in order to best serve your website visitors.

This tends to be the most important phase because it involves us getting to know your company and you, learning what your goals are for your new website, understanding the purpose of your site, who your target audience is and what kind of content they will be expecting when they visit your site.

This stage includes gathering all the content for the website from the client, if they aren’t paying for our team to develop the content. As a matter of fact, we don’t begin any website project without content in hand!

If the client doesn’t know where to start with content creation, and they aren’t paying us to create it for them, we do offer consulting services to talk them through the process and give them direction on their website.

We believe that making sure we are on the same page is the key to keeping you happy with our work and avoiding unnecessary delays due to miscommunication. We conduct solid research to better understand and align what you and your end users are looking for in a website. This saves you time and money in the long run.

If you aren’t willing to work through this discovery process with us, and simply want to dictate how you want your site to look and function, then you might as well find someone on Craigslist who will do a cheap website for you and reap the (terrible) benefits of what they produce.

Listen, we are going to be frank, in order to make sure your website will yield the results you want to see, it is imperative that we get to know your company, and what your goals and expectations are, so we can develop a website that works for you.

As a boutique website design agency, we don’t take on just every client that walks through the doors. It’s imperative that our clients are willing to put in the work to help make their websites a success, just as we are willing to put in the required effort to deliver a product you will love. So this phase is very important to the development of your new site.

Using the plan we have formulated above, it is now time to get down to the design and programming of your site. Again, your target audience is always my first consideration.

Generally we will develop the framework for your site, including a navigational system, a home page, a blog, if you require one, and your interior pages. This will serve as a template for the content of your website. Elements such as the CMS, forms, shopping carts, etc. are implemented at this phase, as well.

Don’t be fooled by website developers who tell you they will just take a free or $69 WordPress template/theme, and for a couple of hundred dollars, change it with your information and photos. While we may, at times, use themes as a base in our designs, generally they are highly customized by the time the entire site is completed, bearing very little resemblance to the original theme.

And, we never use “free” or “budget” themes as a starter framework. Only highly-rated and reputable theme works are allowed in our arsenal of web tools, as we want to make sure they are updated for security by the developer, when needed, and that we have the full support from the original developer if something should go wrong — which you won’t get with a free or budget theme.

Designing a website properly involves an understanding of how to write valid HTML5, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and PHP, that complies to current web standards, understand what responsive design means and how to design for it, and knowing how to maximize functionality and accessibility of your site to the largest audience possible.

If your website developer doesn’t fully understand what all that means, then we suggest running as quickly as possible to someone who does. It’s not that we are trying to be “ugly” here, but anyone with a basic rudimentary knowledge of computers can change the text and pictures in a pre-made theme, but it takes someone with some skill to design a website that doesn’t look like it is a cookie cutter theme or like everyone else’s “budget” website. Even more importantly, that the website is structured correctly for proper SEO.

Also, keep in mind, our designers aren’t just developers. They are actually graphic designers with years of training in design, and understanding of color theory, typography, and creative thinking. We come to you with over 25 years of direct experience with these skill-sets, on top of the tech knowledge for website development.