Building a website can be pretty easy with one of those various turn-key site design companies. Trouble is, by using those you don’t get the flair you need to stand out, the customization you need to get customers exactly what they need and worst of all, you don’t get to work with us on a web development project. Instead of going with the minimum viable options, here’s what happens when you have the pros on your side.
Site Map
It all starts here. This is the blueprint for your web development project. If it were a car, this would be the engineering diagram you need before you get started. A good site map will tell you exactly where all of your various web pages will be, how they interact, and how you can map a customer journey from the home page to product or service research to conversion.
Wireframes
Now that you know where everything will go, you can start building wireframes for various page types. These are sort of like the frame of a car. Your company may need a number of different templates because a blog article won’t use the same template as the home page or a page that lists a matrix of product features.
Mood Boards
As you move forward with web development, a moodboard will help you outline what the site will look like visually and even how it functions. Using our car analogy, it’s a book full of paint jobs and feature sets. A mood board might be composed of a big mess of ideas, thoughts, colors, other websites, feelings or whatever. The idea behind a mood board is to identify what sort of mood your site should have and it’s a direct reflection of your brand identity. Do you want to have a sterile super-businessy site? Maybe something flashy and modern? The choice should be whatever best reflects your brand identity and will serve your customers well.
Design Comps
Once you have an idea of how you want to site to feel, designers will start building a vision of how your pages should look. They may send you a few ideas to pick from and often you’ll have the opportunity to provide your feedback and get your site feeling exactly how you think it should.
Content Creation
This is often done in parallel with design, but content creation includes the actual writing of the web pages, and filling the pages with various content you need, whether it’s composed of videos, infographics, or what have you. Combined with the design, your car now has a paint job and all the little accents. Isn’t web development fun?
Final Layout
Once content and design are finalized, the two will be merged together into your gorgeous new site and our web development project is complete. At this point, you can drive your new site off the lot and into the information superhighway.
