Are you thinking of getting a website? It’s a great idea and I’m not just saying that because I work at a web design company. According to some Canadian stats, 77 percent of Canadians use the internet to research goods and services and 56 percent made an online purchase.
The value of online purchases by Canadians? A huge $18.9 billion in 2012. Click here to see a summary of the study.
You want a piece of that pie. Therefore, you need a website.
So now that I’ve made the case for websites, let’s talk about what’s next.
Actually building the thing.
Stealth has been building websites since 2006 for all kinds of businesses in all kinds of industries. Over that time, we’ve built up a knowledge base about how to create a website that will sell your business, product or service.
Not every company does it the same way of course, but to get a great site, the components should be the similar:
Great Content Effective Design Superior Programming SEO Strategy
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A website that you, your customers and Google will love.
Let’s break it down.
STEP 1: The Content.
If you’ve read any other blogs at Stealth, you might get the idea that we take content very seriously. Content is what brings users to your site and turns them into clients.
So we’ll ask you some questions about your business. We’ll find out some things about your ideal client, your goals and you. Answers to some big picture questions give us a great place to start laying out the navigation for your site.
Trust me when I tell you that writing content for your site is hard work!
Writing and organizing content is always the toughest part for clients. We need a lot of feedback from you if we’re writing it. If you are writing your own content, you need to really sit down and think about what makes your business great. Then write about it.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it to do it right.
STEP 2: The Design.
Every website we build is designed from scratch. No templates. No structure. So we need to build each piece in Photoshop before anything goes to programming.
Before the project hits the design team, we need the text content, logo and any images you want used for the homepage from you. The designers can then use all these elements and what they know about you and your company to build a home page.
This is where things get fun! You get to see what the designers envision for your site. They will send you an image of the concepts they build so that you can have a look.
Now you can tell us what you like and what you don’t. We’ll offer advice on what works and why and what doesn’t. Remember that a website is a marketing tool. It needs to look good of course, but it also has a purpose: to bring you customers!
Once the concept is approved, one of the designers will start designing the rest of the pages. Each page needs to be laid out with text and images which we need before we can get started.
So if you’ve procrastinated writing content, the deadline is now!
You have final approval of these pages and then everything gets sent to programming. After this, we can’t make any changes to the design.
STEP 3: Programming
Finally!
The moment that you’ve been waiting for! All that content and the design that you and we have worked long and hard on are finally going to be turned into a real, working website!
The site is programmed onto a private server and you can have access to the URL so that you can watch everything come together.
It’s super exciting watching all of your hard work go live online! Once programming is complete, you give us the final nod and bingo! A website is born.
Now you may be thinking, especially when it’s put all in a list like this that building a website is easy as pie. Six weeks, tops and we’re good to go.
Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes content and design and scheduling, approvals and programming all come together beautifully and it is that simple. We can build a site in six weeks.
Most of the time, though, building a site takes a while. It’s a big investment in your business and shouldn’t be rushed. You want everything to come together right and so do we.
My best advice? Give yourself lots of time. Think about the content you want on your site before you get started. Make this creation a priority and focus on what needs to get done. That is the best way to not only get the project finished on time but also to make sure you end up with a website that works.
Have questions? Leave them in the comments or give us a call.
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