What To Expect When You Are Expecting A Website

Expecting a website is an exciting event, even more exciting than expecting a new baby! Okay, maybe not quite. However, pregnancy is broken down into 3 phases (trimesters) as is website development. By understanding what happens in each of the 3 stages, you can enjoy the process and understand what necessary in each in order to ensure a healthy, cute, baby .I mean a cool, functional and efficient website!

First Phase – Discovery

You’ve made the decision to build a website and have likely chosen a development team to help you with the building of your new website.  As you enter the first phase you can expect lots of questions from your website development team covering things like:

What is your company brand?

What is the demographic of your ideal client/site visitor?

What type of conversions are you looking for?

What do you competitor’s website look like/do that you want to do/don’t do?

What type of functionality do you want on your site (search function? FAQs? Schedule service form?

This is the phase where you and your development team need to set expectations on both sides so open communication is essential as is giving direct answers about what you want and don’t want, what you like and don’t like.

Second Phase  – Design

In the second phase, like the second trimester, things become real.  You will see a mock-up of your site.  This is a static image of what it will look like. It usually includes your home page and a inner page template.  In this phase, it is important to understand why the design is done the way it is.  You should have discussions about why things are placed where they are, why certain colors were chosen.  In this phase you want to get it as close to perfect as possible because once you move to the Development Phase it becomes harder and more expensive to make changes.  In this phase you will also want to begin writing your content.  Generally a website development team does not write content for your interior pages, so you will need to be prepared to give them the content for pages like “who are we” “testimonials” “service guarantees”, etc. This can be a time consuming process so planning for it and understanding the timing is important.  Ultimately your team will be asking you for final approval to move to the Development Phase.

Third Phase – Development

You are almost there but the third phase is also the longest.  Again, much like the last trimester of pregnancy. In this phase, the code is written to take the website design from a concept to a functioning website.  You will be provided with a link to the development site which will allow you watch your creation come to life.  There will be tweaks and changes made along to way to make sure that the end result is in line with the objectives you set out during Phase One.  Then, it finally happens….you BECOME A PARENT aka YOU GO LIVE!  It is very important that you are available to your development team the week you go live with your actual website as there will be lots of testing and the need for further tweaks and functionality improvements which will need your approval and insight.  

At Wit Digital we are committed to helping our clients enjoy the process of building a new website that can help take their company to a new level. If you’d like to talk to some of our clients that we’ve done websites for just let us know and we can connect you!  Or if you’d like to see how your current website is performing try our free analysis.

You can see Kelsey’s live video on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOnTX9JFQu0&feature=youtu.be.