How the Logical Alternative Design Process Works
You’ve decided it’s time for a refresh or a complete redesign of your website, and you’re wondering how the process will work. Here’s a breakdown of the steps we take to ensure that the redesign goes smoothly and exceeds all your expectations.
Step 1: Define the goals of the project
We’ll work with your stakeholders to define the specific goals and expectations your team has for the project. This will usually include one or more meetings with the stakeholders, which will result in a document that outlines all the objectives and needs of the entire team. We may also provide a questionnaire to stakeholders to help stimulate brainstorming and collaboration.
As part of this step, we will identify obstacles to user experience and mark them for improvement. We will also determine website performance indicators such as conversions to be measured later.
Step 2: Define the pages and Calls to Action
If you have an existing website, we’ll start by creating a sitemap of how the pages and content are organized. We’ll include existing calls to action in this outline. We’ll then work with you to edit and modify this hierarchy outline to better reflect the organization’s goals and objectives.
Where needed, we may also create wireframes of the most important pages to further define user experience and flow.
Note: an important part of this step is to make sure that existing conversions that are working are either maintained or improved upon. Google’s research shows that people have four main intents when surfing the web: “I want to know,” “I want to go,” “I want to do,” and “I want to buy.”
Step 3: Determine schedule and timing
Once we have a complete set of goals, objectives, features, and the site outline, we will be able to schedule the milestones and estimated timeframes for the website production.
Step 4: Gather the content
If new content is needed, this will be created as a collaborative effort between our team and yours. Content may include text, graphics, images, videos, testimonials, and any other components of the new website. We’ll start this process right away, as it often takes time and will affect design decisions.
Step 5: Define the look and feel
Based on the first three steps, we will come up with an initial design for you to review. This will be a preliminary design that includes the home page and one or two additional pages. We will present this for your team’s feedback, and give stakeholders a chance to voice their thoughts and opinions.
Once the initial design review is complete, we will go to work on creating the final look and feel. Depending on how the first preliminary design is received, we may create multiple designs for the second stage of your review; typically, we will have three new designs as a result of the first preliminary review.
After a second review by your principal stakeholders, we will refine the design to your satisfaction. Once the home page and secondary page(s) meet your approval, we will expand the design to create all the layouts needed for the site outline. The stylesheets and templates will be created so that your site design remains consistent throughout.
Step 6: Site buildout
When all the content is ready, the complete site will be built out including all features outlined in steps 1 and 2. This will take place on a development environment so that your existing site remains unaffected. The site will be integrated with all existing services such as your CRM, your donation system, marketing automation, ecommerce, Google maps, etcetera, according to our agreed upon feature set. The content will also be optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at this stage.
Step 7: Testing
In this phase, we will be testing all elements of your new website. We’ll be testing for user experience, accessibility, mobile friendliness, performance, functionality, browser compatibility, and processes. We’ll also be connecting metrics to the site so that we are prepared for go-live.
Step 8: Training and Go-live
The launch process is a carefully considered one. We need to ensure email addresses don’t go down, the site doesn’t have any downtime, any old links are redirected to the new pages, the site is verified to send emails, the sitemap is submitted to search engines, and the server performance is optimized.
This is something we’ve done dozens of times before. We operate to a checklist which we’ve curated over the years. We’ll then test the live site to make sure no new issues have been introduced.
Finally, we will hold one or more remote training sessions to demonstrate website maintenance and content generation. We will also provide reference videos for common website tasks. These are typically hosted on an admin-only area of the website.
Step 9: Post Go-live
We will be here for you after the site launch! We provide fully managed hosting, which includes nightly backups, the highest level of security practices, and detailed reporting based upon your needs. We are also available on an ad-hoc basis for content updates, questions, design, and further training. It’s our goal to be a trusted partner for your organization for the long term, and we take that relationship extremely seriously. That’s what makes us the logical alternative to the industry standard design and hosting options. Our mission is to help you wildly succeed at everything you hope to accomplish as an organization.