Peek Inside Our Custom Web Design Process: What to Expect and Why You Will Love It!
It’s time to bring the excitement back to creating a website! The fact that you’re about to redesign your website or create a new one is a great indicator that your brand is evolving and your company is ready to reach new heights. Congratulations!
We take our clients on a journey to create a website that embodies exactly what they need. Of course, we do not read minds. Instead, we have a kick-ass process in place and establish a partnership with each and every client. Your active participation in the creation of the website is crucial to the overall success of a project. That’s why we treat our clients as partners - our secret is in active collaboration, attentive listening, and empathy.
You are going to love our custom web design service - it took us years to hone the strategy & build a killer process that is centered around the client’s needs and wants.
So, let’s start with the basics...
What is a custom website?
It all starts with a dream. A custom website is built specifically for your company; it reflects your unique brand, fits your personality perfectly, showcases your work, and makes you stand out from the thousands of other lookalike websites out there. It combines striking, bold visuals with ultra-targeted content.
A website goes far beyond the pretty pixels on the internet; it is your strategic, most valuable marketing asset. A custom website reflects your marketing objectives - it means that every landing and sales page, every button and form work to reach your business goals.
When we develop a custom website, we help you create a business model in a box, a marriage of strategic branding and marketing, so to say. A website is much more than just a bunch of pages with some content, but a living organism. It guides its visitors through a marketing funnel, softly transforming them from being complete strangers to your fans, subscribers, and finally clients.
And this is what the custom website is for.
How we work with our clients: a four-step process
Imagine your website shoots a thunderbolt through every visitor! “Snap, this is it! This is what I need!” – you want to hear your target audience say. It is totally achievable through strategic visuals, targeted messaging and custom-tailored copy. The combination of these components makes a good website.
And this is our specialty.We have refined our website creation journey over the years – it consists of 4 stages.
1. Discovery
We start with a discovery stage. Here we conduct a few interviews and you fill out a few questionnaires. We talk to you trying to figure out what it is that you need to build, what your marketing and business objectives are. We also try to understand if we are the right match for each other.
2. Research
Then we move to a research stage. Here we take really thorough research of the custom solutions that we can offer for your project. We present you with design, content, and marketing set up options. We think about marketing features, how to embed them, and how to engage your website visitors.
3. Design
After the research is ready, we go into a design stage. Here we have to find a unique design idea that wraps everything together. We go through an extensive search and present you with several design ideas for the website. You pick one of them. Once we are clear on the website objective, visual part, and we have a very basic wireframe of how it is going to look business-wise, we start actually designing.
It gets really exciting when you see your website coming together in the form of draft images, mockups. We design the whole website in mockups for you to see how everything is organized on-page.
Now is the high time to ask for changes and tweaks in the design. Once the website is up on the Internet, it is harder to do. We can change copy, messaging and do some minor tweaks live, but not the design.
4. Implementation
Once you approve all the mockups, we move to the development stage. We take the mockups and implement them live on the website as they are drawn. A finished pixel-perfect website looks exactly like its prototype. At this stage, any requested design changes are harder to implement and take more time.
How long does the custom web design process take?
Depending on the choice of the platform, we take your project from an idea to implementation in a span of two weeks to 1.5 months. The research part takes about a week. The design takes from several days to a couple of weeks. Moving from a prototype to a fully-build, ready-to-go live website takes about two weeks. But the timeline varies depending on the project.
In our opinion, any corporate brochure-style website shouldn’t take more than a couple of months to implement from the initial discovery call to a completed project. If it takes more than that, it means that you might not be clear on your objectives and on what you wanted to achieve from the beginning. If you worked with web developers before, and the project took months to implement, it means you didn’t have a clear roadmap to work from.
It happens sometimes, but we have enough experience to identify such a situation and help a client to figure it all out. We care deeply about the end result.
An important thing to know is that we do not work with every client who contacts us. Our projects start with a discovery call. The discovery call is both for you and for us to figure out if we should do business together. We want to find good clients as much as you want to find a good web design company. There is zero commitment in the discovery call. We just chat, you ask us all the questions and talk to us about your project.
How to tell you’re ready to go custom
The truth is: Not everybody needs a custom website. There are multiple DIY tools that will allow you to create a really solid foundation for your business without the need to spend thousands of dollars on web developers. What you need is a solid template to start with. A template that translates your brand into visuals and presents your content. You can browse our collection of custom Squarespace templates for inspiration.
We advise against hiring help right from the get-go when launching the first website. When you start your business, you need to figure out what you want from a website. Get your hair and hands dirty and produce the first crappy draft yourself.
Again, you don’t have to be a web developer or to know design to do that. Use DIY tools. Some of them are free for you to experiment without strings or wallet attached. There is nothing new under the sun, somebody has already made a bunch of websites and translated the process into predefined blocks that you can use. When starting out, the goal is to produce the first draft and to put it on the Internet.
In this process, you learn a lot about your website and your business. You see what works and what doesn’t, and gain experience in the process.
How to tell when you are ready to go custom? You probably have a website and it brings you sales and clients. But you also know that it can do much more for your business if only you could implement certain things on it.
You are a busy business owner and you know that you will not have time to do this yourself. What you have is a clear vision of what has to be done and you need professional help. Or, you know your challenges and need a robust problem-solving team to jump on this project.At this stage, you have already learnt some things about your clients with the help of your previous website and you are ready to translate this knowledge into a marketing strategy.
You are the best expert in your own business! Tell us a story of your brand and we will create a perfect layout, beautiful visuals, custom graphics and targeted, laser-sharp copy to convert your perfect audience into subscribers and buyers. Learn more about about our custom web design service here. Let’s form an effective partnership and create a strategy-focused marketing website that will take your business to new levels. Contact us using this page or send us a DM on Instagram.
