Our Process for Building a Website
Imagine you walk into a new business, only to find that the inside is chaos, nothing is ready, and they have no inventory. In our digital age, that’s what it’s like when your website is missing or poorly made. Getting your website up and running is just as important as installing a sign on your building. A broken-down website without an SSL certificate, littered with placeholder copy, or cluttered with pixelated images is a disservice to your brand. Investing in an impressive digital presence is vital — it’s an important piece of the pie.
Over the years, Swash Labs has created many websites, and we’ve continued to grow stronger in our approach to website builds. Our default is to execute above and beyond industry standards. Our team is small but mighty — every department touches a website before it goes up to ensure that the copy is flawless, the metadata and Google Analytics tracking is on point, and the design is pixel perfect.
The exact journey will differ from project to project, but here’s what the general website development process looks like at Swash Labs:
Step 1: Quoting the Project
Unfortunately, just saying “I need a website” isn’t enough information to provide you with an accurate, detailed quote. (In fact, if an agency doesn’t ask any follow-up questions and just sends you a price, run for the hills.) Website quotes require knowing the ins and outs of what you need. Here are some of the questions we might ask a potential website client:
What kind of pages do you know you’ll need? For example – an FAQ? A blog? A contact page?
Do you require any third-party integrations, like ecommerce or an online reservation system?
How many design elements do you need created from scratch? Do you need a logo? Banners? A color palette?
What level of copywriting is needed? Does your website require a lot of detailed content?
When do you need the website completed by?
What are your known budget parameters?
These, and other questions, will help us determine how much work is required to build the website of your dreams, and how much you can expect that to cost. If there are a lot of unknowns at the outset of a project, we may quote you for what we know needs to be done in the short term, and commit to discussing future or more complex work with you down the road.
Step 2: Website Planning
Once we’ve entered into an official contract with our website client, we start the planning process. For some projects, that means determining the best CMS, or content management system, for the new site. (Think: Are we going to build it on Squarespace? Wordpress? Etc.)
Then we begin the sitemapping process. Sitemapping is where we determine what pages are needed and how they will be structured in site navigation. These kinds of decisions are based on conversations with our clients and crawls of their existing website, if they have one.
Step 3: Copywriting & Content Development
Once the sitemap and page structure are finalized and approved by the client, we begin copywriting.
Generally, we have three options for the copywriting process: we can write all the copy from scratch, we can add to and edit existing copy (if you have an existing website), or you can provide source content that we will use to write the final copy.
Let’s explain that last option: sometimes, it’s more efficient for you to provide us with some “bare bones” content about your business to use to develop copy. This is particularly helpful if your business is highly technical — we’re writers, not experts in all industries, so by giving us some content to work with, we can ensure the copy is accurate from the get-go. But don’t worry — we will determine what we need from you, and in most cases we will simply send a list of questions for you to answer. Then we can take those answers and use them to write compelling, fleshed-out copy for your website.
In most cases, we will have the client approve the copy before moving on to the next step — design.
Step 4: Design
Depending on the project, we may create wireframe UI elements for each page layout. A wireframe shows what the design of the website will look like. Then we will either draft the website inside the chosen CMS platform or create design mockups in Adobe XD or Sketch. As we apply graphic elements to the design, we keep an eye on responsive viewports to ensure the site is beautiful across all devices, and we populate each page with the proper metadata (title, description, image) for SEO purposes.
At this point you can review your awesome website, and we’ll make revisions as needed. If the project is a rebuild, we’ll apply redirects and get the sitemap nice and tidy.
Step 5: Setting up Tracking
Each website we develop gets connected to a Google Analytics account. If you have an existing website, we’ll connect your new site to your existing tracking. If your website is brand new, or you don’t have tracking set up, we will set Google Analytics up for you. We endeavor to have every site measure Pageviews and have the infrastructure in place to measure more. Depending on the scope of the site and potential future work, we build the tracking infrastructure accordingly. Having data about how people interact with your website can help you determine if changes are needed, or even inform business decisions.
Step 6: Launch and Beyond
Finally… the moment you’ve been waiting for: time to launch the new website! 🚀 This includes DNS hookup and post-launch QA tests to make sure the website is up to our strict standards.
No matter your business, having a website — and a good one — is more important than ever. Want to talk to us about your website hopes and dreams? Hit us up.
