Through years of experience and hundreds of projects, we have created and refined our own website development process to ensure each website we develop is of the utmost quality. We focus on keeping our code clean and lean, helping its loading speed and SEO. All the while we keep you informed on what stage of the development process we’re in so we can work together to ensure the website is finished when it needs to be. You can rest assured that your site will have great designs, copy, and on-page SEO and be fully optimized to convert more of your visitors into leads and sales. Read on to learn about what our website development process entails.
1 | Research & Planning
Our first step is we need to thoroughly understand your business, your business goals, your customers and their expectations and behavior, and how your website factors into all of it. We’ll also look at the competitive landscape to establish context and benchmarks for how your site should function and then improve on that. This stage will give us the foundation for moving forward with just the right recommendations for the design and development of your new responsive website. We’ll also spot-check your current SEO rank position, domain authority, and online visibility. We’ve been called “SEOs” for a long time, and although we don’t write about SEO much, we put best practices in place on every site we build.
2 | Design & Layout
Once we’re armed with this information, we’ll set to work sketching out interface layouts for 3-5 different views, including the home page, sub page, the blog template, and any additional templates needed. Wireframes look like simple skeletons of your website without the visual polish of the finished design, allowing us to experiment and iterate on solutions quickly so that we have a good sense of how content should be laid out across different screen sizes. Next, we’ll design high-fidelity comps that show what the final designs will look like on desktop, tablet, and smartphone screen sizes, providing up to two rounds of revisions on the design.
3 | Content & SEO
What is a website without content? It’s just a pretty shell. Content is what makes you rank online, it’s what tells your story, and it’s what motivates visitors to engage and convert into customers. Our content experts will help you write every word, using proven psychological triggers and conversion-centric optimizations mixed with great visuals like photos and graphics. Then, we add powerful CTAs (calls to action) so your visitors will convert into leads and sales. We finish that up with powerful on-page SEO to help you rank online!
This is a feature that almost no other web agency offers and is one that will truly make or break your website. There are tons of pretty websites out there in the world, but we build websites that perform and convert visitors into leads and customers!
4 | Frontend & Backend Development
Once you’ve approved the design, we’ll start building your site using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. After testing the static layouts, we integrate the new designs with a custom WordPress theme. To do this we’ll mirror your live site in a development environment, then our QA department will test the site across different browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 9+) and devices (iPhone 4S, Galaxy II). Any bugs that arise from this testing will be fixed prior to launch. Our code is always clean, lean, and bug-free!
5 | Final Testing & Launch
Once the development stage is approved, we start by doing a full website review and pre-launch testing. Then we take your site Live on our website servers, set up website analytics, create your site maps, robots.txt, ping search engines and do all of the other little things we need to do to ensure your website is ready to get traffic.