While it is important to complement all of your Digital Marketing efforts with a crisp and appealing website, not every firm or company knows exactly where or how to get started when it comes to create or redesign their website. Sure, to hire a Web Development Agency is part of the formula, but understanding the process, what parts are involved and most important, having clear goals determined from day one, will help take your web development project to the next level.
I’d like to show you how we break down our deliverables in 4 stages that will help any business to create or redesign their Web assets. Let’s Begin!
1.Discovery Phase
The foundations of your site. During this stage, web development teams are eager to know about your business, understand it, and begin to provide you with great ideas to make it even better. These efforts help you, the stakeholder, to take action towards complying with what you need to kick off the project.
An initial consultation is highly recommended. This gives the chance to most involved parties to interact and to “break the ice”.
This initial approach doesn’t have to be on a specific way for it work, as technology helps us with tools like Google Apps (which uses Hangouts) or Office 365 (which has Skype for Business) to communicate with clients anywhere in the world. Depending also on the needs of the project, an onsite visit is an excellent way to have everyone interact.
During this stage, there’s a series of deliverables that need to be given to the agency in order to proceed. It can change from project to project, but this is the general list of what’s required to start your project:
- Company Logo or Brandbook
- Images (in case you would like to use your very own)
- Sitemap
- Visual & Style References
- Specific Requirements or Features
- Content
You can also download this cheat sheet with what needs to be gathered prior to redesign or create your website
While certainly not all of this has to be delivered at once, the sooner, the better! The faster you get this information rolling to your Web Development Team, the quicker you can launch your new site.
Your Web Dev team will then engage in to researching, planning and scheduling the different deliverables for your review, as well as to research, plan and schedule the project towards its launch.
2. Creative Phase
Here’s where the real fun begins! This is one of the most engaging parts of redesign or create your website, as this is where all the ideas start translating into tangible deliverables.
In order to provide you with a design to review and approve, web development teams first wireframe all of their ideas, to make sure the latest user experience (UX) best practices are being implemented throughout the design. This will not only help set strong bases to whatever design element will be included, but also provides an added value to your website, as clients will be more willing to interact with your content, rather than your competition’s.
After the wireframing stage, your team will start to build your website’s mockup, which will statically show you how the site will look, once visual design principles are applied, typically on a staging platform. We use InVision as the staging platform and it works amazing for us and our clients!
Based on these mockups, you’ll provide feedback to your team so they can start polishing that awesome site in no time!
3. Development Phase
Now that you have in place the goals, materials, and you have approved the mockups for your site, the team will go ahead and develop that design into code. It’s time for the developers to get the best out of their skills, and collaborate towards bringing the site to life.
It depends on the requirements that you have agreed upon with your agency, but typically this stage starts with developing into HTML and CSS the design. This includes making the site adaptable to mobile devices so that people can consume your content on the go as well.
At CXGlobals, we like to offer the capability to our clients to be able to maintain and modify their websites using a content management system such as WordPress, which allows you to be able to make changes visually, creating dynamic content and having an SEO friendly conversion machine with very limited coding skills!
Additional features such as your blog setup, events calendar or even contact forms are implemented as well throughout this stage.
4. Launch Phase
This is one of the most exciting moments in every single project. This is where you get to see your site and actually have a sense of the final production version. As the last stages we’ve covered, there are a few steps to follow in order to comply with this last phase.
There is a Quality Assurance (QA) session and a Client Revision prior to deploying to the final hosting server. During these stages, you have the chance to test drive your website (usually on your Web Dev’s hosting) and see it interact as well on mobile devices as a whole. By this stage, the modifications are minimal as the project complies with your business goals and audience goals already.
Once your blessing to the project is given, the team will have to migrate your site to a hosting environment that is suitable for your needs and the overall site performance. If you’ve gotten to this point and have no idea where to host your website, Siteground has one of the most amazing hosting platforms for WordPress Sites and Godaddy, with their award winning customer service, are one of the best options around when it comes to Shared Hosting.
Finally, a Signoff Training is due, so that you can verify and continue to work on your site as your business continues to scale. Make sure that you have the appropriate people from your company on it, so that they can help improve the site as well.
Next Steps
Now that you are familiar with how smooth your website creation or redesign should be, it’s time for you to go ahead and get started by getting professional help from your desired agency. If you don’t have one yet, our team at CXGlobals is ready to quote and set up this process for you.
Were these tips helpful? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
