The first step includes performing research in order to thoroughly understand your business, goals, customers expectations and behavior, and how your website factors into all of this. We’ll also look at the competitive landscape to establish context and benchmarks for how your site should function and then brainstorm ways to improve on those expectations. This stage will give us the foundation for moving forward with deliberate recommendations for the design and development of your new responsive website.
Together, JGDM and your team will discuss the content needed for the site. We'll have conversations about your primary intensions for the site as well as higher-level discussions about your business goals and visions for the future. By having these discussions, we often find we may be able to add features to your website that can help accomplish these goals. This could include implementing tracking programs like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity or linking your social media profiles to help automate posting to your website or social channels. It could also include building custom solutions that connect your website to various programs your team uses, in order to help streamline website updates or resources your provide to your clients. The sky is the limit!
Once we have a good idea of the content that will need to be available on your site, we'll need to discuss how that content should be organized so that navigating the site is intuitive. When it comes to designing for the user experience, less is more! We want to categorically organize sites in a way that will provide a roadmap for future content so that site will easily remain clean and structured. To do this, we'll work with you to develop a thoughtfully organized main menu and footer for the site.
Sites that use a content management system (CMS) can be updated more efficiently and provide far more flexibility and features than a website built without a management system. We recommend installing WordPress on your servers as your selected CMS. WordPress powers over 40% of all websites worldwide and is also free and open sourced. Because of its economical nature, extreme flexibility, and vast resources, WordPress is the selected CMS for all websites we build.
Once we’re armed with our research and a WordPress development space, we’ll set to work sketching out the layout for the main header, footer, and 3-5 different page views. These pages would likely include the home page, 1-2 sub pages (i.e. an "About" or "Services" page), and an archive page (i.e. a blog, new, or press page). These layouts will be presented as a live staging site so you can see how the site will function on different devices and screen sizes. From here, we'll implement any feedback you provide until you and your team are happy with the overall look and feel of the page designs.
Once you approve the design of the first few pages, we’ll start implementing the design to the various pages of your site using the WordPress installation we setup earlier. We'll also begin uploading and organizing any content we discussed earlier in the "content & architecture" stage of this process. As we move forward, we'll check in with you to get your feedback on the progress made.
Once the website is complete, we'll ask that you and your team give it a good look to ensure everything looks and functions as expected. We'll address any errors discovered during this process until the site is approved to launch.
From the beginning, the site will be built on a temporary URL so that your existing site doesn't experience any downtime. Once the site is ready for launch, we'll make the switch so that your main domain points to your new website.
