How we work on your website
Most website projects do not begin with a sitemap or a technical brief.
They begin with something changing in the business.
Perhaps the current website no longer represents what you do. A service has grown, the business has become more established, the site is awkward to update or you have reached the point where sending somebody to it does not fill you with quite as much confidence as it should.
Sometimes the starting point is even simpler: you know the website needs sorting, but you are not sure what it needs yet.
That is enough.
Our job is to take what you know about your business and turn it into good website decisions. That means understanding what the site needs to help people see, understand, trust and do — then working out the structure, content, design and functionality that will support it.
The route will not be identical for every project. A more defined website package naturally involves fewer decisions than a bespoke website, a substantial redesign or an ecommerce build. But the principle is the same: you should understand what is happening, why it matters and where we need your input along the way.
We start with the business for a reason
It is tempting to start a website project by talking about colours, layouts and how many pages it needs.
We would rather understand the job first.
That means talking about what the business does now, who the website needs to work for, what customers tend to ask, what you would like the website to make easier and where the current situation is getting in the way.
If there is already a website, we have something useful to work from. Some of it may still be doing a perfectly good job. Other parts may belong to an earlier version of the business. There may be useful content worth preserving, pages that have accumulated over time or important things that are much easier to understand when you explain them in person than when somebody reads the site alone.
Those details matter because a website is making an impression before you get the chance to fill in the gaps yourself.
Starting with the business helps us avoid solving the wrong problem. What first looks like a design issue may really be a content problem. A site that feels too small may need better structure rather than dozens of new pages. And occasionally the sensible answer is less work than expected.
We want to understand that before deciding what to build.
Then we turn what you know into a website
Once the business makes sense to us, the website starts to make sense too.
You may know instinctively why two of your services are different because you deal with them every day. Someone arriving from Google does not.
You may know the question almost everyone asks before becoming a customer. That is a useful clue about what the website needs to explain.
You may also know that people normally arrive with very different needs. In that case, the site may need to help them find different routes rather than putting everything on one page and hoping they work it out.
This is where we start shaping the website around real information.
Depending on the project, we may work through the pages that are needed, how services should be organised, what belongs in the navigation, where people need more explanation or reassurance and how things such as forms, bookings, ecommerce or other functionality fit into the journey.
Content and design are part of the same conversation. A good design should make the right information easier to understand; the information should not have to squeeze itself into a layout that was decided first.
We will need your help along the way because there are things about the business we cannot invent. That might mean answering questions, supplying existing content, photographs, branding or product information, or simply telling us when something does not quite represent the business properly.
What we do not expect is for you to turn all of that into a finished website before handing it over.
You bring the business knowledge. We guide what happens to it on the website.
As it takes shape, you stay part of the project
Once the direction is clear enough, planning starts becoming something you can actually see.
The structure, content, design and WordPress development begin to come together. Instead of talking about what the website should do, we are looking at how it actually does it.
There are points where your feedback matters.
You might see a page and realise an important detail is missing. A service may need explaining differently. Something might technically be correct but simply not feel like the business.
That is useful feedback because nobody knows the business quite like you do.
But there is an important distinction between being involved in the project and having to design the project yourself.
We should be able to explain what we are asking you to consider and why. You should not find yourself trying to decide what navigation structure to use, which WordPress feature solves a problem or how a page should work simply because somebody has asked, “What do you want?”
Our part is to bring the website judgement.
By the time the site is approaching completion, it should feel familiar. Not because you designed it yourself, but because you can see how the conversations, information and decisions made along the way have turned into the website in front of you.
A website is more than the pages you can see
As launch gets closer, some less visible parts of the project start to matter.
Every website has a domain name — the address people use to reach it — and it needs hosting, which is where the website itself lives and stays available online.
There may also be email connected to the domain, an existing hosting account, old website pages, analytics, search tools or other services that need to keep working when the new website goes live.
You do not need to understand how all of those systems work.
We do need to understand what is already there.
That might mean establishing where the domain is registered, where the existing website is hosted, what access is available and whether anything else depends on the same setup. If a term such as DNS comes up, we explain what it means in the context of what needs to happen rather than expecting you to arrive knowing it.
There is a practical reason for being careful here.
The website people see is only one part of the digital setup around the business. A new site is not much use if the domain ends up pointing to the wrong place, an important old page disappears unnecessarily or a change is made without considering something else connected to it.
So launch is not treated as the button at the end of the design stage.
It is part of the project.
We bring the final content, forms, links, functionality and mobile experience together, deal with the relevant technical arrangements and make sure the different pieces are ready to work as one website.
Then the project crosses a fairly important line.
It stops being the website we are building and becomes the website your customers are actually using.
Launch is the beginning of the website doing its job
The building project finishes. The life of the website does not.
A service changes. Somebody joins the team. You need another page. A photograph becomes outdated. WordPress needs looking after. Something that made perfect sense when the website launched may need to change as the business develops.
A useful website should be able to live through that.
That is part of why we build in WordPress. It gives the business a flexible foundation rather than treating launch day as the final version of the company forever.
How involved you want to be afterwards is up to you.
Some clients are comfortable making everyday content changes themselves. Others would rather have someone available to take care of the technical side. Website hosting and maintenance are available where that ongoing support is useful, helping with the continuity, updates, backups and technical care that sit behind keeping a website dependable.
Further content, SEO or development may make sense later too, but those things should have a reason to exist. They do not need to be added to the original project just because we offer them.
What matters at the end is that you know what you have, understand the basics of how it fits together and know where help is available if you need it.