Our Website Creation Process
There’s a lot of planning and detailed, hard work that goes into building your website. We have prepared this overview to help you understand how we build your website.
To keep your project on-time and on-budget, we create your website in phases. At the end of each phase, we will submit a set of interim deliverables, which will need to be approved before we begin the next phase. This helps keep the project on-track and identify any potential issues or needed changes that might lead to overruns in time and money.
Here are the eight phases we move through as we create your website:

Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4
Phase 5
Phase 6
Phase 7
Phase 8
Discovery/Strategy
In the Discovery/Strategy Phase, we define your website’s business and marketing objectives, target audience, and features you would like your website to have. We examine your existing marketing efforts and channels, your current website traffic (if you have an existing site), and your competition. We look at how your target audience might find you while searching and develop a keyword and content strategy to reach them.Site Map
During the Site Map Phase, we create your website’s architecture. Our goal is to make a clear, logical page structure for your website so that users and search engines can easily find your content. Through the process of developing a site map, we define the content needs of your website. Often, additional needed content is identified, which will provide a better user experience for your viewer or more information to help with their buying decision.
Content Creation
In the Content Creation Phase, we help you assemble or write your website content using your website sitemap as a guide. We take special care to ensure your content appeals to your target audience and can be easily understood by your viewer. We also make sure your content is keyword focused to help your viewer find it while searching online. We move onto the Design Phase once your website material is completed.
Design
In the Web Design Phase, we design your website’s look and interactive features to create a great user experience for your visitor. As part of the process, we provide layouts of all unique page views for desktop and mobile screens and any desired landing pages or lead generation forms. Though not part of the design, during this phase, we prepare your hosting environment and begin work on local SEO tasks.
Development
During the Development Phase, we bring your 2-dimensional design to life on a staging site and add interactivity. We add your website content and company branding to your site. If it is an ecommerce site, we help set up your WooCommerce Store. We optimize your site and page content for search engines and optimize your images and other media for fast page loading. We prepare an HTML site map, custom pages detailing your privacy and cookie policies, and a custom 404 error page.
Testing
In the Testing Phase, we prepare your staging site for launch. We solicit feedback from real users to help uncover any errors, bugs, or useability issues. We put your website through a 52-point checklist to ensure that its components, third-party plugins, and integrations are working. We also use Google Lighthouse to audit your staging site and score on its mobile performance, SEO, accessibility, and coding practices.
Launch
During the Launch Phase, we bring your staging site live. After a little well-deserved celebration (yippee!), we get to work, letting search engines know about your website. We configure your security plugin, activate your website caching, and connect your website to analytic tools to help you monitor your website performance.
Training
During the last phase, the Training Phase, we conduct in-person or virtual training to help you and your staff become comfortable using and updating your new website. All training will take place on the development site. We also give you a tour of Google Analytics and Google Search Console so that you can quickly monitor how viewers are finding, viewing, and using your website. We leave you with a Owner’s Guide with important information about your website and a written Training Manual with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.