Web Designers Process For Creating A Clients Website
Website Design and Search Engine Optimization is essential for business of all sizes, but not all companies can afford the cost from some web design agencies. A website has to fit into the marketing budget for any company. The other factors are website hosting, maintenance, theme updates, plugin updates, security and the need to update information or add blog posts.
The Process Of A Web Designer Creating A Website
In this short blog article I will explain how we at Digi Dezine operate from start to finish when designing a website or re-designing an outdated website. When I state re-design, that refers to rebuilding an outdated website. There are some cases where we will go into a website that a company or an individual has designed. There are factors such as the previous theme used to design a website. We work with WordPress premium themes and developers that we have already worked with and are sure of a quality coded theme that the developer updates regularly. There thousands of themes and developers and many are good and more than many that are not reliable. Our themes are well coded that function properly and are updated on a regular basis. The WordPress theme has to be compatible with the most standard plugins to function well. We update our sites between 2 – 3 times per week depending on the sites plugins. Updating the websites theme and plugins are essential for quality function and to decrease the chance of attempted hacks. Yes you read this correctly, WordPress or any content management system published on the internet are attacked daily and those numbers are in the 100 of thousands daily. There are plugins and website security plugins that are essential when publishing a website. There are also quality User log-in and passwords that are difficult to bypass along with lockout features for brute force attacks.
Strategy For The Specific Industry Of The Web Design
We discuss your companies industry and if you presently have a website along with what your present website if any is attaining or not attaining. A strategy for what you want to achieve and how to help attain it is part of our process. We prefer to have quality images related to your business, exterior images of your office and interior images along with staff if necessary. For example a Law Firm may have 5 attorney’s, a paralegal and other office staff. We then set profiles up for each Attorney and what areas of practice they work in.
Content is written by a company employee or the owner. It is best to have content written by someone who knows your company and the industry well. We may make some changes to the format of the writing and some additions for search engine optimization purposes.
We design our sites for speed which requires optimizing the images to a smaller file size while still maintaining quality. We use the best caching plugins and certain codes to enhance performance and speed. At Dig Dezine we host all our sites on our VPS (virtual private server) hosting account. A VPS account is faster and is not the typical shared hosting service. Some of the more common hosting services do not work well with WordPress.
Design On The Permanent Domain Or Temporary Domain
If a company wants the website on a domain that presently does not have a website, we build the site directly to the domain with a construction page that displays the company Logo, contact information, a launch date, social media site links and a short phrase about the company. If there is a site up presently, we build the website on a temporary domain that we create and when ready migrate the site to the permanent domain. This saves any downtime of your website. We also create as many email addresses as needed.
Before completely publishing the site to the general public, we have our clients approval. At Digi Dezine we want our clients successful and happy with the website and will make changes free of charge for one month minimum as long as it is not redesigning the website. Our agreement clearly states what we do and what functions are needed to design a high quality website that our clients are proud of and represents their company image in a professional manner. Digi Dezine not only wants our clients happy, but we do not want a web design that has our brand attached to it that is not perfect by the highest of standards and represents what we do to the general public.
Specifics of what a client wants and what we feel is necessary is stated up front and our suggestions are strictly to improve the websites performance for function, design and driving traffic. In some cases many companies just need a portfolio type of design to display their work and have plenty of business, but want to show potential clients their work such as architects and construction companies.
Educating Our Clients
We also educate our clients in basic social media marketing to utilize all avenues of marketing. Many companies do not have a budget to hire firms to manage the social media platforms and in most cases is not necessary.
As far as posting blog updates and news about events or company information, we can teach basics in that area. Unless someone has some knowledge of WordPress, I usually do not recommend posting yourself mostly for SEO purposes and adding images that are optimized properly. Our fees to add blog posts is very fair and we are usually very competitive relative to our competition. The cost of a quality web design will more than pay for itself in time.
One of our first WordPress web designs was for a local Las Vegas Law Firm. This firm in the past paid exorbitant web design, maintenance and SEO costs with little results. Within two and a half months of publishing the new website a gain of 25,000.00 in new business was attained. Since that time our Law Firm client has contracted Digi Dezine for a second website and referred Attorney’s. A very important factor in achieving fast first page results on the second website was the domain name suggested by our company and a well optimized website. As of recent the client asked us to remove the chat element from his site as his firm is overwhelmed with business. As a digital marketing agency we at Digi Dezine felt that the request to remove the chat option from his site was the highest compliment we could receive along with the most gratification for our work. If you have owned a website and never paid Google a penny for advertising, you as a business owner can appreciate that type of success from a website.
This article should give the reader a reasonable understanding of the process whether they decide to contract Digi Dezine to build a company website and ability to make the decision making process a little easier along with questions to ask when researching web design companies.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions by email or phone us directly and if our voicemail picks up, please leave a message with a short description of the purpose of your call and we will get back to you ASAP!
March 26, 2017
Time 11:00pm
