Services - Full Websites
When we are building a site to represent you, we need to understand your
business. Here is an overview of the questions we ask and the approach we take
to build or upgrade a full website.
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Establish the reasons and priorities for your Website
We will work with you to figure out what your company needs from a website and where
you expect your online visitors to come from. What percentage of your online
business do you expect to be Leads, Referrals, Prospects, Active Clients, Past
Clients, Business Partners, et al?
Once we know why we are building the site, we can quickly move on to establish which pages and features need to be included, and what the site map will be.
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The Project Plan
We give our clients a project plan, showing what we expect to accomplish each
week, and what the deliverables will be. We tend to work with local businesses -
if your business is a good candidate for membership of the Chamber of Commerce,
then we are probably a good provider for you. When necessary, we can 'turn and burn' a
good business site in less than a week. But running projects part time over 3 -
5 weeks gives our clients the opportunity for full communication and
progress reviews.
A typical project schedule might be:
- Week 0: Plan. Establish website priorities and site map. Determine
project scope and project bid.
- Week 1: Prep. Establish access to domain, hosting and email.
Select a
design theme or template.
- Week 2: Graphics. Photos and Text Content. Gather soft copy of client
text, photos, logos
etc.
- Week 3: First Draft of the site available for review. Client reviews
site, we make updates.
- Week 4: Second Draft available for review and update. 'Soft Launch' to Friends and Family.
- Week 5: Gather feedback from the soft launch, make
updates. Full Launch
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The Design: Site Colors,
Fonts
and Look-and-Feel
Do you like the designs in our portfolio? Most of them - including this site - came from templates:
These are pre-built design frameworks that include the colors, fonts, styles
and general 'look-and-feel' of a site. These are available at low cost from large on-line suppliers. Once we review your logo and company
brand, we bring you a short list of design options. As we integrate your logo,
branding. colors and photos, the site becomes individually 'yours'. We can take
the site a long way to customize it for you.
Click here to see the original template for this site. You can think of it like a
contractor receiving a standard set of plans from an architect. The contractor and homeowner can go on to modify many
aspects of the home they are building.
The Words on the site: Text Content?
Once we have established the site map - the list of pages that will be in the
website- we are ready to start creating the text content.
We have options:
- You can write the content. This can work well if you are used to generating marketing materials.
- We can write it. This usually works best if we have some company literature to start from.
- We can partner with a
communications specialist to write the marketing copy for your site.
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