The Website Design Process

 

Step 1: Get a Clear Marketing Vision

In our first meeting we'll discuss your business, your audience, and your visual tastes, to know how best to approach the project, and we will offer suggestions on a marketing strategy for your business.  Here we will also establish how the website content should be organized.  If you don't have a domain name yet, we'll help you decide on one.  If you don't have a logo yet, we do that too!

Step 2: Create Website Content

Begin Creating and collecting content such as paragraphs about your services, staff, business, etc.  We also want to collect images.  Acquiring images can happen three possible ways: creating new images, purchasing stock images, downloading free to use images.  Images play an important role in most websites as they are probably the first thing your website will say to a new visitor; and of course the right image can be "worth a thousand words".

Step 3: Create Working Model of your New Website

The next step will be for James Web Design to create a working model based on your colors, design, and organization, complete wtih whatever content we have.  The working model will have in place all the ideas we worked out in step one, and we will easily be able to make changes on the fly.  Configuring the working model will also serve to introduce some of the content management process.

Step 4: Webmaster Collaboration

For some clients, this step will simply involve sending us all the content they can, and have us integrate it into the website, applying layout styles, etc.  For other clients this step can be a collaboration in other ways such as beginning to edit pages on their own and provide training on the "back-end" site management process.  (It's easy, don't worry!)

Step 5: Go Live

This final step is when we finally make changes to your domain name so that it points to your new website.  At this point, we'll make a number of changes to the site to configure it properly for the domain name.  We will establish a Google+ profile page to get the site into Google maps if it isn't already. We will also work together to set up Google tools that will later be used to evaluate the website's performance in searches. 

Phase 2: Search Engine Optimization

After the site goes live, we'll need to give it a few weeks for Google and other search engines to index it and learn about it.  Generally, after about 2 months, we suggest another meeting to evaluate the data in the Google tools (Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools) to see what can be improved with regard to search engine visibility.  One of the simplest ideas about SEO is that you're trying to have your site tell Google what you're about with the same phrases that your potential customers will likely use when they search for your services.  There are other factors to SEO as well, such as how present the site is on other search directories, social networks, Youtube, etc.  All these can be addressed in Phase 2 and generally take between 10-15 hours to evaluate, make changes, and propagate your site to other directories and social networks.