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What is "designing a web site? What exactly will you do for me?
Web Design Part 1: Learning about you!
If you really think about it, designing a web site has very little to do with creating
web pages.
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Designing a web site is about collecting information and ideas. It's more than just laying out
pretty pictures of your product or services (although you want to do that too).
It's your chance to get out the information that lets people know why they should choose you!
About what makes you special!
There's a reason why we say:
If we do our job right, you'll learn very little about web
design and we'll learn all about your business
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The process of designing your web site has some major pieces to the puzzle. One of the most important
things to do is sit down with you and collect as much
information as possible about what you do and what you want to say.
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Some of the information that should come out during this is:
- Finding out what you want your site to look like. After all it is a graphical medium
to convey your message.
- What is your message. Why are you the person to pick for this product or service.
- What are the products and / or services themselves.
- What is the way you do business. Potential clients who've absorbed information
about your way of doing business and then contact you are more likely to convert into real sales.
- What are the ways you want to funnel site visitors - Do you want to direct them to products or services?
some other particular information? a contact us/ estimate form?
- While we're evaluating the content we'll determine if any of it is a good candidate for MyCCMS™ content management system development.
Web Design part 2: put together some demo home pages and building the whole web site
Once all your information has been gathered and categorized, we'll put together one or two (or however many is needed)
demo sites. once you've selected a format for the site, we'll start building it out using the information we've collected.
We'll take that information and use it in a few ways:
- To define the "menu" structure for your web site. It's important to provide the visitor with a navigation
system that conforms to normal expectations but also drives visitors to the right content
- To create compelling copy for the web site
- As a starting point to research standard information about your area of expertise and add other content
areas as needed (see SEO for some info about this)
- To do a basic optimizing of pages
- create a sitemap.
You can keep tabs along the way to make sure the site is coming together to your liking. Don't be surprised if it
looks a little bland at the start. You'll find the site fills in quite nicely as it's being built.
Although we strive to minimize the amount of disruption to your day while designing the site,
there's just no way around this:
You are going to need to look at every page on the site and make sure you like what your getting!
You wouldn't go to Barnes & Nobles and buy a book and then not read every page of it would you?
Web Design Part 3: Going live
The process of going live is mainly administrative, Going live typically involves the following:
- Setting up the desired domain name (actually if it's new we'll secure it the day we start the project)
- Setting up your's and any employee email addresses
- Set up the site for SEO and statistical services (Google analytics, site maps, Google local business listings, etc.)
- Get the site submitted to search engines
Web Design Part 4: After that:
There's some options about managing the web site after going live. We can administer it for you or you can do things yourself.
Things to consider are:
1) how the site gets updated - Do you want to pay us for every update, have a MyCCMS system to
update certain areas yourself, etc.
2) Who administers email - Typically for most clients we act as the "off site IT" when it comes to
email administration for either new or accounts needing deletion, phone support to get users going, etc.
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P.O. Box 67
Bellingham, MA
02019
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28 Summer St
Medway, MA
02053
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