[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]Did you ever wonder how your website comes into being? The process that goes on behind the scenes or how it moves from design, to development, and hops onto your website domain?
Presenting… the birds and the bees… WEBSITE EDITION
*Warning: this article contains explicit information about website creation. Caution is advised.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”20″ down=”20″][vc_column_text]
Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start)…
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The first stage of website creation is of course planning. Our team leader sits down with you and we listen to what you need your website to do. Who it’s for, what features it should have, what its purpose is in life. Whether that’s selling products, promoting your brand, advertising your location, more of a B2B informative role, or some combination of the above. The more you can tell us about your target market, the better. Then, we also go away and research your industry, your competitors and international contemporaries. Armed with the knowledge of your business and your goals, we tell you what we can do and estimate the complexity of the work.
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Setting the scene
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Next up, we meet with our team to brainstorm ideas for your new website. We pass on all the knowledge from our meeting to the designer. It’s the graphic designer’s job to visualise the website – coming up with the colour scheme, the layout of the website, and the overall theme or branding – what makes your website belong to you. Usually, we’ll do a mock-up of at least the home page and send it to you. You can review the colours, layout, style, fonts and so on, and provide plenty of feedback if it’s not quite right yet. We’ll go back and forth at this stage until you’re happy with the designs. Sometimes it’s spot on first time, sometimes there are multiple tweaks to be made – it’s different with each client.
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Let’s get physical
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In other words, it’s production time baby! Enter the IT geeks – the programmers, the backend developers, the technophiles. This is the process of actually building what we’ve designed on paper. Typically, we use WordPress to build your website – that’s because it’s easy for you to self-manage, it’s endlessly customisable and has a great worldwide community supporting the technology. We work with a WordPress theme and fully customise it to your requirements – branding, features, layout, structure… the works. Now we start to see those designs come to life on the screen, and we can customise and play around with the website capabilities. We also have our designer on hand during this time to work on the frontend design of the website and ensure the look is consistent with our original designs.
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An eye for detail
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While all this is going on, we also have a copywriter working on your website project too. The job of the copywriter is to make your website attractive to online visitors – and to the search engine robots. We provide basic SEO (search engine optimisation) as part of website packages, which includes using descriptive URLs, having a good title and description on your homepage, and indexing your website using Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools). Our copywriter can either write your website content for you, or you can provide this. If you do go for full copywriting, we meet with you to determine the tone and style of the content – for example, whether it’s fun and informal, professional and serious, quirky and clever, and so on. Our copywriter oversees the whole website project, keeping an eye out for those all-important details and checking and proofreading the whole website.
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Handing over the [website] baby
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Once website production is almost finished, we’ll provide you with a link to view your new website online on our staging server. (Don’t worry – the website is available to view, but Joe Public can’t find it by browsing online.) We’ll invite you to review our work so far and give us feedback – what needs to be tweaked, adjustments to the layout, and anything which you think isn’t quite right. We allow 2 weeks for you to collect your feedback and pass it back to us, and we’ll work with you to develop the website until you’re satisfied. Of course, this stage is not the time to be adding new features to the website that haven’t previously been discussed! When this happens, we often suggest planning a ‘Stage 2’ scope for the website that can be developed after the go-live date. At the review stage, it’s important to keep up momentum and stay on top of the communication to ensure we meet our deadline go-live date.
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We have lift-off
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The most satisfying part of the whole job for us is seeing your new website go live online! We love that feeling of hard work well done and hope that you feel the same. It takes us about an hour to push your website live, and we usually do this in the evening as it requires your existing site (if you have one) to be down for about half an hour. We’ll stay on-hand just in case anything going wrong in the website transfer. We don’t do website transfers on Friday nights, ‘cos that’s when we’re down the pub! On the technical side of things, if you do have an existing website, we need to grab the UDAI details from you or your hosting company.
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On-going care and support
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Of course, once the project is finished, that doesn’t mean you’re on your own with your new website. We provide training to make sure you and your staff are comfortable editing the website yourselves. It’s not as daunting as it sounds – WordPress is well-known for being easy and simple to use, no matter your level of technical ability. You’ll be able to add or change content, change images, add new products or testimonials and so on. On our side, we stay in touch and provide free website support, included in your monthly hosting fee. If you have a problem with your website, we’ll investigate and fix the issue for you.
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As you can see, there is a whole team of people dedicated to bringing your website to life, from planning, to design, to production and on-going support. We have a small team which means everyone gets involved in each project we undertake, working together to ensure the best outcome, from every angle.
Got questions about our web design process we haven’t answered here? Drop us a line.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]
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