Before something meaningful can be made we need to make sense of business requirements, user needs, diverse strategies, messaging, available technologies and everything else that goes into the recipe for a successful project.
During our initial consultation, we’ll establish your current and future objectives and lock down scope of work, timeline, and budget. We may walk you through an example of what our typical project proposal looks like and if needed we may schedule a follow-up call to further scope your project. Finally, we will discuss next steps.
After our discovery call, we will put together a scope of work outline, timeline, and budget proposal. This will be handed off via a Google Doc so we can both review, revise and approve the SOW.
Once the scope of work is approved, we will write-up a comprehensive master service agreement for us to review, redline and e-sign.
After you review and e-sign the master service agreement we will invite you to our project tracker where the SOW will be outlined by task, as well as a list of project set-up tasks that will be assigned. These tasks will include instructions for asset & credential hand-off, communication set-up, and kick-off call scheduling to get things starting.
We keep everyone on track through a simple but effective communication plan and a one on one dedicated point of contact.
Once we've set-up our communication channels and have successfully on-boarded you to our project tracker we will then schedule a Kick-Off call to go over the following topics and review every detail of your project again before moving forward into the Site Map Planning & Information Architecture phase.
Things we will discuss:
1. Analyze & Understand Current Brand ID & assets
(Persona | Tone | Vision | Color Palette | Use of Graphics, Video, etc)
2. Analyze & Understand Information on sites goals, user flow, etc
3. Analyze client Inspirations, Likes & Dislikes
4. Analyze Website Concerns/Pain Points
5. Website Aesthetic Brainstorming w/ Client
In this (optional) stage we will help you plan your new sitemap and map out the new customer journey of your website.
Our dedicated team will help you identify your major visitor types and how to guide them through the content we're showcasing in a way that works intuitively and directs all of your visitors to the information they need. It's important that we tell the story your brand deserves. We will take a look at your current URL and on-page SEO structure so we can plan ahead, implementing best development practices throughout the build to retain your URL structure and current SEO. If you have analytics or any site data, we may analyze those metrics at this time and utilize that data to help optimize your Information Architecture.
In order to create meaningful design, we need to truly understand the content we are working with and create a story around your content. This is where creative content planning comes into play. Your project strategist will help take a creative approach to understanding your content and the story we are telling with it, allowing us to plan for those flashy Hero page illustrations, advanced interactivity, and more ... in a meaningful way. This way we can go directly into the design phase with a strong sense of purpose and understanding.
Whatever your business, our goal is to help you create an authentic storyline to guide your users through your website and make your business shine. If you've requested help with copy and messaging in your scope of work then we’ll work with you prior to the design phase to revamp, re-write or co-write new copy depending on your needs. This fresh copy will be linked to your information architecture map in a tool like "SlickPlan" and ready to utilize within our design phase.
After we've completed the pre-build strategy process we'll typically go into creating wireframes to review and approve with our client. After we've solidified Wireframes our top design priority within the design phase is to create meaningful & strategic general creative direction as a base for your sites aesthetic. This general direction will typically be a first draft of your homepage and allows us to lock-in our aesthetic moving into our page by page design, review, and approval process.
After we lock-in a tier 1 general creative direction as a base for your site. We'll be ready to start tracking design progress on each page, and completing revision rounds. We typically design each page out in a tool like Figma or Sketch and then run each page through 2-3 collaborative revision rounds with both of our teams. This is all tracked within our project management tool. While each page is being designed we may simultaneously be working on Interaction Planning, Brand ID, Logo, Illustrations, and other marketing collateral as apart of our scope. Once all design assets have been completed and approved we'll be ready for our development hand-off call.
After we have completed high-fidelity designs ready for development we'll schedule a dev hand-off call. After transitioning the tone of the project towards development. We will work be working with you page by page to develop your custom pages and integrations. You'll be able to watch every-step of the way via a live preview link of our work. Each page will be tracked, developed, reviewed and approved.
Upfront in our discovery phase we may have identified some "Custom development" items within your scope of work. If so, we'll be handling those items in this phase of the project alongside front-end development. This includes API Integrations, Custom Forms, Membership Sites, Ecommerce, Log-in, Large content migration, Etc...
These On-Page SEO attributes we will make sure are built into your project:
If there is a lot of content to move on certain pages (blog, etc), it won’t make sense to manually migrate by entering it through the CMS one by one, we’ll want to upload via a CSV, however, most of the time this content isn’t accessible via CSV. In order to solve this issue we’ll write custom scripts to pull the site content data accurately and securely over to your freshly built CMS on Webflow, or we will handle the manual data entry on a case to case basis.
Here's a brief tutorial series which will help to get up to speed on the Webflow CMS (Editor). It's incredibly user friendly :)
1. Client’s guide to the Webflow Editor: Introduction
Link for download: http://bit.ly/Editors-Intro
2. Client’s guide to the Webflow Editor: Pages tab
Link for download: http://bit.ly/Editor-Pages-tab
3. Client’s guide to the Webflow Editor: Collections tab
Link for download: http://bit.ly/Editor-Collections-tab
When we're finished with your project we'll create a custom video series outlining how to take full advantage of the Webflow Editor.
Before we launch your website we'll complete an internal Q/A and triple check everything, once we have the green light we'll transfer the completed Webflow website to your account and create 2 back-ups. Depending on the scope of work we'll either help with deployment and launch on Webflow or we'll help you migrate the website to another platform of your choice.
Congrats!! You're a fellow Webflower :)
Have a new project in mind? Schedule a 30 minute discovery call and I will at the very least give you some great advice.
Thanks, we've received your details and will get in touch ASAP!
A request for proposal (RFP) is a great way for you to quickly get us up to speed on your project. It should include an introduction to your company and the reason for submitting your RFP. Tell us what it is you hope to accomplish with us and lay out any problems you or your users face with your current site. Lastly, please provide an overview of your project scope, timeline, and budget. We're happy to guide you through this on a call.
