The Website Process
You've signed up for your new website. Now what? Below explains our process and what to expect.
What We Need
Your Logo
Ideally, we would like to have this in its original design file (PS or AI), but we will also accept a hi-res png, jpeg or svg. Uploaded to your Google Drive Project Folder.
Login Credentials
Your current website, hosting and domain registrar logins. We will send a questionnaire for this.
Access to Google Analytics
Login to your Google Analytics or you can add our email as an admin user to both GA and Search Console.
Images & Photos
Current and or new images and photos you would like to use on your website. Search Adobe Stock for stock images or hire a photographer for a more personal experience.
Content/Copy
Content or copy for your new website. We will send a Content Intake Worksheet for you to complete. We need this before we can build your website.
Style Guide
If you do not have a style guide from a graphic designer, providing us with a doc of your brand colors, palette preferences and guidelines to follow is helpful.
Project Management Tools
Google Drive
We use Google Drive for the majority of the project intake and sharing. A project folder will be set up during the onboarding process. You will have a project dashboard with everything pertaining to your website project. Here is a video to familiarize yourself with how to use it. Start at minute 2 for a faster intro.
Dubsado
Dubsado is an all-in-one client management platform designed to streamline the business side of creative work. We create and store all of your contracts, invoices and some questionnaires here. While there is a portal, we do not utilize it since we mainly work in Google Drive.
Zoom
We use Zoom for all of our project meetings. How to get Zoom.
The Process Overview
1. Pick Template + Pay
2. Set-Up Project Folder
3. Intake Questionnaires
4. Content Worksheet
5. We Build Your Site
6. Client Review & Final Edits
7. Launch Your Site
8. Hosting & Maintenance
9. We're Here For You
Communication
We keep the majority of our project communication within our team email address of [email protected]
If you need to communicate with us, the best way to do so is via a short email so we can keep all project details in writing. For anything that will take more than 5 minutes to explain or understand, we can book a phone consultation. In order to keep communications in a centralized location and to ensure the SWD team can have quick access to your requests, we do not use text to communicate business-related items. We ask that you do the same and stick to emailing your communication and requests.
Office Hours
Our typical client office hours are 9:00AM – 4:00PM EST.
While we do not work on the weekends, we often will check email. If something truly urgent (ie your site is down) comes up – send an email with “urgent” in the subject line. Please reserve this for true emergencies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Our goal is to get your website built within 2-4 weeks. There are variables that could affect that timeline such as demand and our communication. We will notify you if we expect it to take longer than 2 weeks.
On the flip side, if the website is stalled due to no response from the client, the project will be canceled and will need to be restarted. We understand that things come up in life and can pause a project if that is the case. But if after 3 months of no response from the client and several attempts to reach out, we will need to start over with a new package.
Some things that can delay the timeline:
- Slow communication/response time
- Waiting for content
- Illness/vacations/travel
- Adding new features to the project beyond the original scope
- Waiting on client approval
- Design changes
We are focused on giving you the best possible end product and prefer to take the time necessary to provide that quality of service and deliverable.
See above. You will receive an intake form that will walk you through how to submit your content (text and images for your site). We manage our projects in Google Drive and we will keep everything related to your project there.
We assume hosting for all of the sites that we build. As a part of that, we offer basic website care and hosting at a monthly investment of $75/month. This covers the cost of us going into your site each week to make infrastructure updates that protect your site from malware and downtime. We also keep a secure copy of your site in the event that you need emergency site restoration.
We can license basic subscription images from Adobe Stock. You provide us with the image numbers and we can license and add the images. We prefer you do this since you know best which images you like.
Here are some other places you can search for images.
FREE SITES:
Pexels
Pixabay
Unsplash
PAID SITES:
Creative Market
Deposit Photos
Haute Stock
Pixistock
123RF
Shutterstock
We do have a selection of done-for-you-domains and logos for brand-new businesses, but we do not purchase domains on your behalf. We recommend you purchase your domain through GoDaddy Your business’s domain is a valuable asset that should remain under your control.
Typically, no. But if something urgent comes up and a member of our team is available, we do our best to jump in to help.