Professional Website Design Process

Understand

The first step in designing a successful website is to gather information. We look at how you’re covering the topics that are important to your audience, and weather you’re maintaining a good mix of content types. Auditing your existing content also helps find holes that you can fill with new content pieces, or identify great pieces of content that can be repurposed into other formats to reach even more prospects.

Plan

Using the information gathered, we establish a plan that acts as a reference guide for the duration of the project. Decisions about content, organization, and priority will be presented, discussed and refined. This is essential to developing a consistent, easy to understand navigation system. At the end of this phase, we should have a plan, approved by you, that clearly sets out the project requirements for strategy.

Design

Keeping consistent with your pre-defined brand standards, we perfect the look and feel of your new website. In this phase you have the opportunity to express your likes and dislikes on the design. We work together until we arrive at the final design for the site. Then development can begin. . .

Development

Development involves the bulk of the programming. We build the framework and templates for each page type, then integrate any special feature. We also take your content and distribute it throughout the site. The entire time, you’ll have access to watch our progress as we build your site.

Test and Deliver

We examine every single page on the site to make sure everything is consistent with the plan and working properly. Each component is thoroughly tested for both performance and functionality. Once we receive your final approval, it’s time to launch the site. We upload the files and setup Google’s analytic and tracking tools; in most cases, this also involves applying search engine friendly techniques to preserve your current search engine rankings.

Quality Assurance

One months post-launch, we verify that the website supports the original goals and that the metrics generated are inline with expectations. Given the opportunity, our team evaluates your website in search of opportunities to modify content and navigation to improve the user experience. Upon completion of any assessment or revision, analysis reports will be documented for future reference.

Digital Marketing Tactic: Introduction

Our digital marketing tactic is iterative; subsequent experimental plans will be based on the outcome of the previous experiments. Each improvement builds upon the success of the previous ones. Experimental plans are presented in a logical order structured around the simple SOSTAC™ framework:

1. Situation analysis – where are we now?
2. Objectives – where do we want to be?
3. Strategy – how do we get there?
4. Tactic – how exactly do we get there?
5. Actions –who does what and when?
6. Control – how do we monitor performance?

Situation analysis

It doesn’t matter how good your website or product is if you’re asking the wrong people to do the wrong thing at the wrong time – which is why you need to start with an understanding of your different visitor types and intentions. We start by studying your marketplace – for example, your competitors, and what your customers are saying in social media and on review sites – and then explore possibilities for improving your positioning by building upon your company’s core strengths.

Objectives

Identify and select your target keywords, set goals for your paid search, improve campaign structure, improve your targeting, improve your offer and creative, get your bidding and budgeting right, and optimizing paid search campaign performance are just a few of digital marketing objectives we’ll help you work towards.

Strategy

The best search engine marketing practice isn’t a particular type of page element. It’s a well-defined, systematic process – a series of steps you need to take. It requires intelligence, experience, craft and expertise in a wide range of disciplines. Using all of the ideas generated from the situation analysis we prioritize the big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. Efforts are prioritized on parts of your business that are easiest to make changes to. The key is to identify all of the persuasion assets, and then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process.

Tactic

We recommend the PRACE framework to help small and large businesses alike to review and prioritize opportunities available from digital marketing:

• Plan – getting started
  • Identify and select your target keywords
  • Define key performance indicators (KPI’s)
  • Customer insight (who, why, how?)
  • Competitor analysis
  • Market trends
  • Internal capabilities and resources
• Reach – build awareness
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Pay Per Click (PPC)
  • Online advertising
  • Online PR
  • Social Media Marketing
• Act & Convert – convert to sale
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • Lead generation techniques
  • Home page optimization
  • Landing page optimization
  • AB and multivariate testing
• Engage – retention and growth
  • Content marketing strategy
  • eNewsletters and promotional emails
  • Customer service and support
  • Mobile marketing
  • Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Actions

There are many levels to Digital Marketing and if you have a desire to learn and invest time you can save money by absorbing some of the responsibilities such as, publishing articles, writing content, social media, acquiring backlinks and more. After internal resources and skill are identified we ensure roles, responsibilities, process and systems are clearly defined.

Control

Capturing the voice of the customer is more difficult with the web, but it can be done. Using web analytics and digital marketing tools we seek to understand your entire conversion funnel, starting with the initial ad impression where someone first encounters your business and finishing with the thank-you page and beyond. Also, we implement appropriate feedback mechanisms for capturing the most common objections. Then gather, record and analyze the feedback.

Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to compete. Also, as your conversion rate grows, more opportunities present themselves. After each test, it’s important to step back and take a look at the whole conversion funnel again, to determine which part of the business you should focus on next.