When you hire us to craft a custom web design for you, it’s the beginning of a complex process. That doesn’t necessarily mean long or difficult—we can get that website out to you in a matter of weeks—but it does mean that we have to create a strategy that involves many different aspects of your business, your audience, and your brand before we even think about the website.
When we create a custom web design for your business, we go beyond the look of your website and the words on the page. We dive into your ideal audience, your brand, and how we can communicate your message best. We do all the heavy lifting so that you can get back to running your business.
But wait, aren’t we just building a website? It’s just a marketing tool—what’s all this strategy and planning you’re talking about?
Creating a successful website is like starting a garden—it has to be planned carefully. You can’t just throw a bunch of seeds and fertilizer on the ground and expect a garden to grow—the right plants have to be chosen, some plants need to be excluded. All the plants that eventually go into the ground need to be nurtured effectively so they turn out as planned. Building a website is the same way—it takes a great amount of planning and a carefully prepared strategy to launch and grow the way you need it to.
That’s because your website is not just a marketing tool.
Your website is your most visible component of your brand online. In effect, it’s like an online hub for your business, representing your brand as though your customers were actually in your brick-and-mortar store. And that’s why it has to be so well thought out—because digital presence becomes more important every day in our increasingly digital world.
How We Begin Creating Your Custom Web Design
To start building your website, we look first at your audience. No custom web design would be complete without a solid idea of who the website is targeting, so we work with you to clearly define your target audience. We’ll create one or more audience personas that will help us see how exactly we need to craft portions of the website at that audience.
Then we take a look at your brand—your website is a very important component of your overall marketing strategy, so we want to make sure it fits within this strategy and fully represents your brand. We create a brand persona document for your business that coherently represents what your brand is and what it isn’t. We use this to make many of the design choices.
Next, we’ll dive into the objectives for your site. What’s the purpose? What does success look like? What do you want people to do when they come to your website? Without these goals and objectives, the project is fruitless and you’ll never really drive new business without focusing on how your website should operate in the sales cycle.
Finally, we take a look at content. If you already have content, we look at how the content will drive the design. For instance, if you have a very large number of products and they need to appear multiple times throughout your website with detailed descriptions, that’s going to drive how the website is laid out.
We decide at this point how content is going to be handled. Do you want to keep the same content, or would you rather have us write new content for you? Some of our clients choose an in between option and have us edit some of their current content. Once we have completed a thorough content audit, we can start thinking about design.
Once all the groundwork has been laid, we can finally start thinking about the custom web design itself.
The Four Phase Evolution of Your Website
We typically go through six different phases before your website is complete. We need all this time to make sure that your website is completely customized to your precise specifications and that you receive a premium product.
Phase 1—Mood Boards
We start with mood boards or style tiles to nail down the look and feel of your website. We try out a few different takes on your current branding to see what aspect of your logo and color you want reflected in your new website.
Phase 2—Home Page Mockups
Next, we create some homepage designs based on your branding, your content, and the audience and brand personas we’ve created. We typically begin with 3 different mockups based on the moodboards, website objectives, audience and brand. We’ll review the design choices with you and take your feedback.
And that’s just round 1.
Then, we are able to fine tune the design to better align with your branding and to meet your specific needs. After we’ve applied the revisions, we send the 3 new mockups back to you for more review.
For the final round of revision, we’re looking to crystalize the design in a way that makes everyone happy while still meeting the needs of your customers and presenting your content in the most useful manner possible.
The other pages of your site will typically be designed in the browser based on your home page. Each project is different,
Phase 3—Development and Testing
Finally, we move on to development. Once we have the design nailed down, we can start creating the functionality of your website—making sure it can do the things you need it to do. We’ll create forms, add in products if you’ve purchased an ecommerce website, and build out any specialty functions that you need, such as the ability to do affiliate marketing.
After that, we begin a painstaking testing phase. To make sure your website is fully responsive and will work on any device, mobile or otherwise, we test the look and feel of your website at hundreds of different screen sizes. When we’re finally certain that your website meets all necessary web standards, we can plan the launch.
Phase 4—Launch
The fourth and final phase is the launch of your website, which typically takes place over the weekend.
After around 6 weeks (on average, some sites take longer), you have a completely custom website, although the time it takes to create a custom web design often fluctuates depending on your needs. You end up with a marketing space for your business online that represents your brand and gives your customers what they need.
If you’re ready to get a custom website, click here to contact us.
If you’re not sure you need a fully customize website, then you need LaunchPad—our affordable website solution for small business owners: Click here to learn more about LaunchPad.