Before we do anything, I always make sure to find out as much as I can about your project and assess your current website – for free. In this stage, I analyze the technologies your site is using, what it is built on, how it is maintained, and offer up any suggestions that I think might help. It’s also a good time to realize if this is a good fit for the both of us. I love what I do, and one of the reasons I like doing it is because I get to meet some great people. If you are interested in getting a completely free consultation on your project and analysis of your current website, click here.

Let’s get down to the thing that matters most – your business. We’ll go over what you are ultimately looking to achieve and what I will be able to do to assist you in reaching that goal. I’ll take a look at the competitive landscape and assess what is working and what isn’t. We’ll iron out things like defining your target market and assessing the channels that you see the majority of your website visitors coming from. These kinds of questions help me form the right course of action when it comes time to designing and implementing a content strategy that fits the needs of your business and its customers.

I’m not ashamed to admit it – this is by far my favorite part of the entire process. I’ll work with your logo and brand colors to deliver the website design you want and love. The visual will remain consistent to the brand while adhering to the main goals we outlined in our Discovery phase of the project. We will start off with wireframes that serve as the basis for how the content will be laid out through the site. Once a structure has been agreed upon, I will start bringing the brand to life in mockups. These mockups will serve as a pixel perfect representation of your website. At this time we will go through one round of revision, which is your chance to gather a list of everything you would like to see changed from the mockup I sent. Once those changes are squared away, we’re ready for development!

Time to turn that mockup into a functional user interface for your visitors. It goes without saying in todays age, that every website should be responsive–which simply means that your website will look great on any screen size. Your visitors are coming to your site from a ton of different devices: phones, laptops, tablets, etcetera. A broken or faulty experience across any of those could result in a frustrated user. Your website will look good and function on all screen sizes and use the most up to date web languages and technologies. My preferred choice of content management system (CMS) to build websites on is called WordPress. WordPress houses ~30% of all live websites today and is the tried and true CMS. I have used others like Drupal, Umbraco, and Squarespace, but find maintenance and ease of use to be the best for my clients on WordPress. Plain old HTML websites are a great option from some, too! Running your business successfully is a full time job in itself, so I never expect someone to allocate extra time to updating content, writing blog posts, and keeping up with all other maintenance and security measures so I always offer a maintenance plan for all of the sites I do.

A good part of QA happens in the development stage, but any quality web designer would be remiss not to do a round or two of QA before he/she is ready to put a site live on the internet for public consumption. I will run through the site and make sure it looks good on multiple screens. I will also set you up with any email addresses that were discussed during the Discovery stage and make sure all of the forms are functioning properly. Once I check everything off, we are ready to go live!

Now that you have a shiny new website that you love, it is time for it to gain some traction with Google so that it can be found. A clean, usable website is a great improvement that is necessary for any business, but it doesn’t help much if no one can find it! Search engine optimization (SEO) can be utilized to make your business show up in Google’s results when people search for you, and a social media strategy can be put in place to help you connect with and find new customers. Basic SEO measures are put into place with every site I do, but I provide additional SEO services that are a little more robust and aggressive in their plan of attack for those who want them. You love your new site – let it be seen!