Website design shouldn’t be a mystery. Let me tell you a bit about how you and I can work together to build or redesign your website. How we work together helps each of us with our expectations, helps us know what is needed next, and keeps us on track. Time is money for both you and I, so laying out how we work together makes good sense.

Here are the steps:

Pick and pay for a website design product

We can change products in mid-stream if we need or want to, but this gets the ball rolling. It may be that all you want is a website designer outside of your current provider to critique your website design. You want a report you can reference to see where improvements could be made or where things are working out right. So you pick and pay for the Website Design Analysis.

Or you need to put a brand new site out on the Internet. Then you would pick the Basic Web Design Package that will get you through everything from selecting your web site name to the final documentation I turn over to you when we are done.

Or it may be that you know you want to redesign your site. In that case, you choose the Website Redesign Package.

Maybe none of that fits exactly right. In that case, contact me and you and I will figure out how much the work will cost and I’ll have you get the Custom Website Design for the work.

You fill out the Ten Keyboards website design questionnaire

Once you pick and pay for your product, you get a questionnaire to help us get clarity around what you want to do with your website design.

Some website designers criticize questionnaires. They usually want to discover everything from nothing–and taking longer to do so on the hourly rate while doing it.

I think questionnaires force you to clarify how your business is done with customers and gets you clear on what you want your website to do. Those two points, by the way, are the biggest challenges businesses have–what do I want to stand for with my customer?

The questionnaire also makes it much faster for me to get a lot of baseline information out of the way, saving us time. It gets me to learning about your business, customers, and competitors much quicker, making me more effective, faster.

We talk on the phone and go through the project

This is a project, you know. Many steps to get from point A to point B. Off of the questionnaire, we’ll talk and figure out our scope for the website design and what we want to accomplish when we are done with our project.

I send you a project plan for the work and you modify or approve

Using our information, I put together a plan for the work and the associated dates and milestones for the project. It won’t be complicated, but it will give us a handy reference to see what needs doing with the website design, who is responsible for doing it, and when it needs to be done.

I set up your entire website for you to see before going live

You want to see your web site progress and see it before sending it out to the world, don’t you? That’s why I set up your website design so you have easy access to view it–but search engines and the rest of the world doesn’t. This makes it incredibly simple for you to validate the website design work, know what has been done on the website, and offers you an opportunity to critique what you see.

We go live!

What happens in this stage is that I set up the behind the scenes infrastructure for the website design on your production site: the program, the theme, the plugins, and the security. Then I export all of the website design from our private site and import it onto the production site.

Then, depending on what we are doing–moving the site to a different hosting company, using the current one or building something brand new–we initiate the move to the new website. This usually is a complete day of work and is usually done on the weekend because there is less traffic.

There is more to be done

Just because you went live on your new website design doesn’t mean the work is done. It may be there are e-mail accounts to set up. There is certainly the project documentation to deliver. The documentation includes your access user names and passwords. The database names and passwords. All the stuff that a technical person would need for future reference.

Our final meeting

Here we do one last review of the website design project and make sure there are no “hanging chads” out there for either one of us to do. You could consider it a project sign off and that would be accurate. It’s to make sure that what was in the website design project was completed and that you have the information you need for your site.

Websites take time and there is a surprising amount of give and take between you and me while we are working it. Even a small website can easily take a month to do. Not because it couldn’t be done in a forty hour week, but because sometimes you need to contemplate what has been done or see a page presented differently to better meet your business objectives. In other words, you need to let the creativity flow to get what you want from the site. Obviously, if it needs to be done quickly, we can and modify later.

Using this website design process, I’ll learn some stuff about your business. The cool thing? You will too and your business will be better for it.

Pick a product and let’s get started.