1 – THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TO GET STARTED

The very first thing we need is a hand-drawn sketch of what you would like to see on the site. Nothing fancy, something like this.

 

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website wireframe

Then, we need the following:

YOUR LOGO

PDF, EPS or high res JPEG or PNG if possible.

HOSTING CREDENTIALS

Your hosting account login and/or Cpanel username and password.

WORDPRESS LOGIN

An administrator login to your current WordPress site. (If you have one up already.)

IMAGES, PICTURES AND DOCS

Current and/or new images, pictures and documents you’d like to use on the new site.

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CONTENT

We’re designers, not mindreaders. We need any page content and any updated wording/information for the site.

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STYLE GUIDE

Brand style guide, colors or any specific design requirements.

2 – DROPBOX

Dropbox is a great online image/file sharing platform. This isn’t necessary for every project, but if you have more than 15-20 images for your website or if they’re too big to send through email or post on basecamp, we can use dropbox. We can also use this to share important logins and credentials instead of sending through email. I will set up a folder for the project and will share the folder with you via email. You can upload all images and files there.

3 – THE DESIGN WORKFLOW

Designing a website, no matter how big or small, is an extensive process that can be overwhelming. To better help you understand what to expect during the design and development workflow, we’ve outlined our process into 3 steps:

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LAYOUT AND DESIGN

A large and time consuming part of designing a website is in the planning and layout stage of the process. We’ll create the sitemap (Page/Menu hierarchy) of the website for approval first, then  design the home page and a sub page (or more upon request) for approval.

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DEVELOPMENT

Once the site layout and design is approved, we’ll move forward with the design of the entire site, all pages and add all functionality and plugins. We’ll make sure your site looks great and functions nicely across all devices and web browsers before moving to the final step.

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EDITS AND REVISIONS

Once the site is ready for final review, you’ll be able to review each page and we can make detailed edits until the site is completed. We ask that you please review ALL pages to make sure all spelling, grammar, addresses and information are correct before going live. We use https://reviewyoursitelive.com or https://reviewmysitelive.com for our website walk-throughs.

5 – ACTIVATING THE NEW SITE

Once the site is ready to go live, all unnecessary plugins, pages, images and back-end files will be removed. The new site will be backed up and saved locally and remotely, should it ever need restored. Once live, it may take between 24-48 hours for the new site to pull up on some devices. Some computers will need to be refreshed in order to see the new site, though most computers will see the new site immediately depending on the wifi connection and where they are in relation to the location of server that the website is on.

We will provide a brief walk-through of your new site to show you how to update content and we have tutorial videos embedded in the back-end for when you need a refresher course or two.