Discovery

It all starts with an initial consultation, which will determine:

Your goals
Your challenges
Any integrations you currently have or want to integrate in the future
SEO goals or current meta data and tracking goals you need to migrate
Your top performing pages so we can ensure they maintain their rankings
Understanding your current client engagement – case studies, testimonials, FAQs, blogs, resources
Your audience types – this is essential to ensure we have content and visuals that connect directly with your target audiences
Your competitors – what can we use against them, what are the opportunities and how do you want to differentiate yourself
Your calls to action (CTAs) – what do you want your audience to do when they land on your website?
Your Content – Will you be writing the content and providing the images, or do you need support from our team?
Your Branding – Do you have guidelines for us or is it time to reposition your brand?
Your value proposition – is it immediately clear what you do and how you help people?
Finally your launch date

Content

To go much further, we need to know whether you will be providing web-ready content, or if you have commissioned us to support you with this, our content team will contact you to get started.

Great content is essential – it engages your potential customers with your value proposition, provides high-quality content for your search engine rankings, and above all, increases conversions.

Project settings

Once we’ve created your sitemap and timeline, we’ll use Asana to internally plan your project with checkpoints and each phase, backwards from your delivery date.

This can be shared with you at key stages to align teams to the deadline.

Visuals

We work with you to identify key pages that can be visualized as ‘flat’ visuals (eg before we build anything) to ensure the right tone, style and message. This is done from the signed out textual content and we usually start on the home page and go to the service page or other identified page. The content may look different once you see it in situ, so this is your opportunity to make minor adjustments to the content as well.

Server Settings

While the content and visuals are running, we’ll set up the server for you:

Configuring a cPanel or NGINX instance that is optimized for your website’s needs
Set up a development domain, SSL certificates and crawl stops to prevent Google from indexing your development site
Deploy a basic WordPress installation ready for development

Development

Once we have the initial visuals checked out, we’ll move on to building in the browser. This will help you get a “real” feel for the site and a tangible point of interest.

Key stages will be shared with you along the way, so we can continue to check off modules to make sure it’s in line with the vision and not a big ‘surprise – here’s your website!’

For more complex or custom builds, there will be full stack development rounds for functionality and integrations so we can test things like payment systems and CRM APIs.

Testing

Now that the whole site is up and running, the first products can go through testing. This is done on multiple systems and multiple browsers – they all behave slightly differently, so we need to make sure it looks great everywhere.

QA (Quality Assurance)

In addition to testing designers and developers, the project management team will perform separate QA for sense checking, spell checking, and of course against typing. This is done on key modules and again once the site is ready for first delivery.

First shipment

You’ve seen the phases in progress, but First Delivery is our complete first delivery of the site to you, which you can share with the wider team / key stakeholders and review all content before the next phase.

Mobile Optimization

We’re working a bit on the mobile version of the site during design and development, but once the desktop design and content is approved, we’ll go through the site from top to bottom to ensure it’s as smooth as possible.

Feedback

To keep changes to a minimum, we show you the site at various stages of the build process, but full feedback on first delivery is your chance to see everything for yourself.

Launch

Big event – and as much as we wish it was the push of a button, it really isn’t! We will hold a go-live day at the start of the project and reconfirm when we are closer to completion.

There are usually busy days in between so we can make sure the relevant teams are available – including your IT team if you’re managing your domain.

We never power up on a Friday – there’s a 30+ point launch checklist (checking web form submissions, etc.) and post-launch activities that no one wants to do on the weekend.

Post-launch checks

This is usually 2 weeks after launch to check speed performance and make sure you are happy with your site.