Have you ever asked yourself what web designers actually do in order to make sure that websites are built fit for purpose? What goes in to every stage of the process, from doodling a few boxes on a piece of paper to launching a fully mobile optimised website that will help to take your business up a level?
Maybe this is the first time you’ve been involved with a website build. Perhaps you’re worried that you’re going to be overwhelmed with technical questions and treated like a bit of a plonker if there is something you don’t understand.
Not every web design agency will do everything right. Some cut corners, others simply don’t realise certain corners exist.
So if you’ve ever wanted to know what we do once a project has been green-lit – and perhaps find out what your last web designers didn’t do, hence your need for a new website – then read on.
A website is more than just an online presence for your business. It's a tool that can help grow the business, and it's one of the most important digital marketing assets a company has. Don't think of it as "just" a website. It's your 24/7 showroom, your 356 sales team and the go-to place for most people when they want to see what your business does and how you do it.
That's why we're here. We want to help change the way you view your website, so we have developed our web design process to make sure we nail it for you.
Like with most things, there's more to a website than simply looking nice. You could have the prettiest looking website in your profession, but if it's built badly from the ground up then its beauty is only skin deep and will very quickly start to fade.
Imagine your website less as a nice-looking brochure and more like your main Head Office building. You wouldn't simply tell the first construction company you find to just go ahead and build it without any sort of plans. In order to make the space not only amazing to look at, but also practical to get around and built to last, you'd need to follow the traditional stages - architects, surveyors, builders, designers etc.
We're going to design your website so it's organised, practical and built to help you eventually achieve the top rankings on the main go-to search engines. If the foundations are solid, the race to the top page of Google is much easier than if you're starting out waist-deep in quicksand.
We're going to work with you to carefully work out not only how your website looks and feels, but also what it says. The best websites act as a 24/7 sales team, turning visitors into customers without you lifting a finger.
We'll work tirelessly to design a layout that conveys trust, creates a feeling of authority and helps your brand to not just compete with but stand out from your competitors.
From the moment they click onto your site, we will have carved out a user journey to lead your visitors to take out the action you want them to do - anything from simply joining your email list to purchasing your highest valued product.
We will take what you may or may not already have, pull it apart, work out how to do it better and then build a centrepiece to your entire online marketing strategy, resulting in an ROI that'll leave you sleeping like a baby for years to come.
Here's what we're going to do to help your business.
Discovery
Without discovery, there is nothing. Literally. So it’s the first part of our web design process.
All of our projects – and those of even our most semi-competent competitors – start with the discovery phase. This is the bit where we work out what we need to do for you:
- What are your competitors doing both well and badly?
- What is your industry doing as a whole?
- What about your company do we need to make sure your visitors know about in order to turn them into customers?
- What are the keywords we need to be aware of now to make your SEO easier in 12 months?
It’s just the web design industry’s way of saying “research”. It will lead in turn to everything else we do on your website project – knowledge of how the site must be constructed, what pages need to be made and what sort of things need to go on them.
Basically, it’s the part of the project where we will understand who you are, what you do and how we can make sure your website tells the world just how amazing you are compared to everyone else doing it.
Site Architecture
To call this part “fun” itself would be a stretch, but it’s an essential step along the way to getting to the fun bit. This part of the process entails taking what we learned during discovery and building a big-picture idea of how your website will be made up.
We’ll create a sitemap (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like), working out all of the pages, posts and categories we will need to make, and how they should all be linked together, to set your site off on the right SEO path.
If this stage is done correctly, your chances of showing up on top of Google are a lot higher than if you skip this. It’s why we never skip it. Taking this little extra bit of time here saves a bunch of it further down the process.
UI Design
Your website is like your business – lots of different departments (pages) all doing their individual jobs and tasks in order to make the company as a whole work.
Every site we build has a purpose behind it. It may simply be brand awareness, but more likely it’s lead generation and/or sales. Similarly, every page of your new site will have a purpose behind it, and needs to be designed accordingly.
Again, think of it like building your new amazing Head Office. You know at some point people are going to need the toilet, but it doesn’t mean you’d stick a urinal in the middle of the reception. Similarly, there would be little point in putting the water cooler in a locked supply closet. Just because it’s one big building doesn’t mean each individual space doesn’t have its own purpose.
Ensuring that the pages (and site in general) are laid out in a sensible fashion will make it easy for visitors to navigate around and work out what you want from them. And a properly directed visitor is much more likely to become a customer than someone left sitting in your foyer, worrying why it smells of urinal cakes.
This process of working out how the website should flow is called UI Design – the user experience you’ll be providing to visitors of your site as they navigate around.
When done properly, UI can double (at least) your website’s conversion rates, dramatically reduce the rate at which someone leaves the site after viewing just one page (called the “bounce rate”) and increase the chance of a visitor returning in the future.
During this phase, we’ll create the blueprints of your new website, called wireframes. They are vital components of the initial prototype phase and allow us to cut out any of the potential trip hazards before anything too time-consuming is designed.
Outlining and Copywriting
Have you ever found yourself looking at an amazing, jazzy, animated and captivating looking website, reading through the text and finding yourself thinking “I have no idea what any of this means”? Because we have, on an almost daily basis.
You can have the most amazing looking website on the internet, but if the copywriting isn’t good enough to back it up then you might as well not bother having one. The pen (okay, keyboard) is still much, much mightier than the sword.
Copywriting is not just about knocking some words out, it is an art form. Persuasive, informative text that explains to the reader what the heck is going on, as well as making them want to be a part of it, is worth its weight in gold.
Right now, you are reading professionally written copy. We have honed it over days, weeks and months to ensure that all of the information explains who we are as a company, what we will do for you, and why you should trust us to do it for you. We haven’t simply said, “We make websites – email us now so we can give you a quote”. We are, in fact, begging you not to do that yet – keep reading about us, about our process, so that by the end of it you’ll be begging us to work with you.
Typically, a page on a business website will have anywhere from 500 to 5,000 words of written content designed to persuade each visitor to do something – call, email, buy. There’s a case to be made that the copy is more important than the website’s aesthetic design: no amount of pulsating blobs or fade-in images will make a dubious reader into a customer, but well written, persuasive copy, outlining what you do for your customers, will make all of the difference.
You may well know more about your business than anyone else in the world. You may have spent years working on your products and know it all inside out – but if you can’t explain your services, your ethos or even how to connect you to a potential buyer, you will just be wasting yours and their time. YOU already know why a new visitor should trust you and your company – but a copywriter helps that visitor to understand it for themselves.
Not only that, good copywriting is another link in the SEO chain, helping to get your website ranking as quickly as possible.
We can’t force you to use our in-house copywriters, any more than we can force you to stop wearing that cardigan which makes you look a bit weird. But we can actively and passionately advise you that, as the experts, it’s best to let the experts do what they do.
UX Design
Your website is like your business – lots of different departments (pages) all doing their individual jobs and tasks in order to make the company as a whole work.
Every site we build has a purpose behind it. It may simply be brand awareness, but more likely it’s lead generation and/or sales. Similarly, every page of your new site will have a purpose behind it, and needs to be designed accordingly.
Again, think of it like building your new amazing Head Office. You know at some point people are going to need the toilet, but it doesn’t mean you’d stick a urinal in the middle of the reception. Similarly, there would be little point in putting the water cooler in a locked supply closet. Just because it’s one big building doesn’t mean each individual space doesn’t have its own purpose.
Ensuring that the pages (and site in general) are laid out in a sensible fashion will make it easy for visitors to navigate around and work out what you want from them. And a properly directed visitor is much more likely to become a customer than someone left sitting in your foyer, worrying why it smells of urinal cakes.
This process of working out how the website should flow is called UI Design – the user experience you’ll be providing to visitors of your site as they navigate around.
When done properly, UI can double (at least) your website’s conversion rates, dramatically reduce the rate at which someone leaves the site after viewing just one page (called the “bounce rate”) and increase the chance of a visitor returning in the future.
During this phase, we’ll create the blueprints of your new website, called wireframes. They are vital components of the initial prototype phase and allow us to cut out any of the potential trip hazards before anything too time-consuming is designed.
Responsive Development
Once you have given the green light to the UI and UX stages, everything is handed to the nerds in the development team. It’s their job to take the blueprints and the artist’s impression we made earlier and code it up into a fully functioning WordPress website.
Everything will be designed to be mobile responsive, given that checking the internet on a phone or tablet is more common now than sitting at a computer to go online.
Like the builders of your new Head Office, if the developers have the proper wireframes, glossy design layouts and professionally written copy to work with the development phase is extremely smooth, efficient and fast. 99% of the time, this stage will only go a bit wobbly if corners have been cut (or never even taken) in the previous rounds building up to the development period.
This is the part where the interior designers come in, paint everything beige, pop a pot-plant in the corner of the Board Room and build all the flatpack desks.
We have designed a process for a reason. It’s there to ensure nothing is missed, nothing is half-arsed and the project keeps ticking along within both the agreed timelines AND budget.
All of the steps in this process are designed to keep your potential customers at heart, so we don’t lose track of your goals.
Optimisation and Launch
As the development phase begins to reach its conclusion, the work turns to testing and optimisation of the “finished” website. Your new site will be viewed and tested on a range of major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge etc) and popular mobile devices/screen sizes to make sure that it looks great however your visitors may choose to view it.
We’ll go through a checklist of SEO bits to make sure that everything is as perfect as possible before launch – the better start a website is given from day one, the better it will be received by the robots who control the search engines.
Once everything is finished, signed off and paid for, the site will go live on your domain name. At this point, the “build” phase is completed, the website is online for everyone to see and the process of getting your ROI begins.
Now it’s time to move to Phase Two – Website Management and Marketing.
Management and Marketing
Once a website has been launched, it’s there for the world to see. The only slight issue is that unless you tell the world it’s there, no one is likely to find it. Simply building a new website and expecting it to propel you into the next level of business without marketing it would be like opening a new shop down a side road and not thinking to mention to anyone that you’re there. Sure, the shop looks great and will have the added bonus of not having customers messing up the products on the shelves, but there’s simply no point to having it if no one ever visits.
Your new website needs a consistent marketing and development plan in order to make it a success. Sorry to be the ones to tell you this, but yes – you will need to spend more money on it once it’s live.
We can help with both the technical side of things – hosting, basic maintenance and security monitoring – and ongoing marketing services such as content marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (basically a never-ending discovery phase, constantly evolving elements of the website, it’s content and pages) and digital marketing like PPC campaigns.
A new website with no plan is basically going to die a long, slow death. Your better-prepared competitors will overtake you, your potential new clients will end up going with them, even though we all know you are much better than that lot down the road. The trouble is, you haven’t been reminding everyone about it.
Our management and marketing packages are all based on annual subscriptions, which gives us the time to show the value in what we do. There are no shortcuts in the world of SEO and online dominance. But the rewards are there to be had if you’re prepared to put in the hard work. Which, fortunately for you, is what we’re here to do!