Many web design agencies don’t have a standard design & development process – and that’s probably going to be their downfall.
Here at Revved Digital, we have implemented a simple, effective, and time-saving design and development process that makes working with our web design agency easy and efficient.
So, what is our web design agency design process?
First, I want to apologize in advance to our past clients who we’ve worked with before we streamlined our design and development process.
It hasn’t been easy, but together with your help, we’ve learned from our mistakes and have improved our internal processes.
In 2020, we took the much-needed time to completely analyze the way we work internally, communicate with our clients, and deliver websites and SEO plans.
It definitely paid off.
For other new web design agency owners out there who are reading this, I hope that this post helps you learn more about how important a streamlined design and development process is for building websites for clients.
Here we go:
Phase I: Discovery.
Before we jump into designing websites for our clients, we need to learn as much as we can about their business, competition, customers, and existing website and brand.
During this phase, we collect important data that we’re going to need in order to build our clients’ websites.
We collect things like their logo files, passwords, social media information, key competitors, ideal SEO keywords and keyword groupings, brand collateral and marketing documentation, API keys for software which needs to be integrated into their website, and more.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we collect this info, send us a message and ask!
Phase II: Design.
During this stage, we provide our clients with a round of mockup designs, typically starting from rough sketches and evolving into a high-fidelity website mockup.
Sometimes, we skip the sketching – usually when a client already has a website and doesn’t need it totally re-designed, but instead “elevated”.
We require all of our clients to sign off on designs before we move on to the next round of mockups – this protects our time, and also promotes rapid design iterations.
Phase III: Development.
We know that there are website builders other than WordPress out there… but WordPress is simply our favorite way to build websites.
WordPress is secure, trustworthy, lightweight, open-source, and adaptive.
For these reasons, we choose to work with WordPress and build websites on the platform from the ground-up.
We sometimes use themes, when our clients don’t have large budgets – but we love a good “from-scratch” website project!
We will never begin developing a website before the final round of designs has been approved – this is because it slows us down tremendously.
We only develop websites when our clients have approved all of the designs we’ve given them, and they have signed their approvals with PandaDoc (that’s how we send and receive proposals, contracts, approvals, and invoices).
Phase IV: Delivery
Finally, once the website has been built, we hand it off to our clients.
Unless, of course, they’ve decided that they want to put us in charge of managing their website for them.
Delivery is an extremely important part of the website design and development process, so we spare no expense here.
During our Delivery phase, we provide website training, share all of the assets we’ve created for the new website, and also offer a 60-day post-delivery support window.
During that support window, we are available for bug-fixes, copy changes, and slight modifications to the site.
That’s how our website design and delivery process works.
Sound easy? Good – it’s meant to!
We spent quite some time streamlining this process, and so far, we are loving how much time it’s saved us in designing, developing, and delivering websites to our clients.
If you also own a web design agency, let me know in the comments section how you handle your internal design and delivery process.
I’m eager to find out how other people are doing it!