Step 1: Initial conversation

In our very first conversation, we’ll talk through the the basic elements of your project.

• The current status of your website and branding (is your branding likely to change, do you need branding documents created, do you know what your needs are likely to be, etc.)
• The business goals and needs your website should address. Are we building a site to build credibility, or for specific functionality (e.g. online sales), and what are the overall needs that you’re hoping to meet?
• Timeline: when are you hoping to launch, and what can we expect the process of gathering content to look like?

We’ll also likely point you toward some resources, depending on your needs, that will help start your thought process.

Step 2: Wireframe call

At this stage, we’ll do a 30-45 minute call to talk through your needs in more detail.

We’ll do a screenshare, open up Sketch (a design program), and see how far we can get in laying out your homepage. The purpose of this call is not to design your site.

We likely won’t end up with something beautiful at this stage. Instead, we’ll do a couple of things that are more important for now:

• Arrange the elements of your homepage, which will very likely roughly correspond with the overall goals of your site (if they don’t, at least to some degree, something’s wrong).
• Talk through the individual pages of your site. We’re not going to hold you to a specific number of pages or anything like that, but it’s very helpful to somewhat organize your navigation menu, because that’s going to tell us in particular about all of the various content types that will likely need built for your site. A few examples of content types: blog posts, job listings, events, products, staff members, testimonials/reviews, partners/logos of other companies, and services.
• Look at sample sites that have similar functionality. That could include your competitors, sites that you just happen to like, and may also include other sites we built that meet similar needs.

By the end of this call, we’ll have enough information to build a full proposal, including budget and timeline. We’ll also send you the wireframe after the call. The wireframe is yours and that you’re welcome to use even if we don’t end up working together.

Step 3: Proposal

We’ll put together a full proposal for your project.

You can ask questions, get clarifications, etc. Once that’s signed, we’ll get rolling!

Step 4: Development

We develop the site on a local server, then periodically push our changes up to a staging server.

Generally, this process will take a couple of weeks (more if it’s an ecommerce site). It’s not at all uncommon for us to be waiting on content for longer than the development process takes, and usually that sort of information is the limiting factor in terms of getting launched.

About half way through this process, we’ll be giving you access to the site on the staging domain, something like yourcompanyname.flywheelsites.com. We’ll likely do a call to walk through what’s done, what’s not, and highlight the most important content that we’ll need to get launched.

Depending on your preferences, we can give you direct access to make tweaks to the text, etc. at this point (some clients prefer it, some prefer to send me emails with notes). If you’re relatively tech-friendly, it’s usually much faster to fix typos and the like directly than to make lists of them and email them to me, but I’m happy either way.

Step 5: Site Launch

Once everything’s approved, we’ll launch your site. Here’s our criteria for when it’s appropriate to launch a site:

• All major functionality is built.
• The site is better than any old versions of the site, is more editable and more extendable than old versions, and meets your needs substantively better than any old versions.
• All vital components of the site are in place (if you don’t have, for example, bios for each of your staff members, that’s perfectly fine, we can make sure the functionality is completely set up, then simply hide the page and remove it from the navigation menu for the purpose of launch).
• There’s no filler text (e.g. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet) left on the site.
• There’s nothing that’s actually incorrect or broken on the site, and nothing that says “coming soon.” Coming soon is a terrible message to send to your customers. Whenever I see a site with the words “coming soon” on it, my first assumption is that this page has been showing that message for at least a year. I’m not the only one who thinks that way.
• You are ready to launch. This is the most important criteria, and probably the highest bar to clear for most sites.

Step 6: Post Launch

We’ll run through our post-launch checklist. This is not an exhaustive list, but on most sites, we’ll need to do at least the following:

• Google Analytics installed
• Sitemap set up (usually we’ll either use Yoast or Rank Math for this, although in WordPress 5.5, this functionality will be in the WordPress core).
• Google Search Console connected, and the sitemap submitted so that Google can start crawling
• Key pages from the old site should be 301 redirected to the corresponding location on the new site

How-to videos

Every site we build for an end client will include a set of how-to guides in the form of video tutorials walking you through how to use your site.

These will usually run a total of about 45 minutes to an hour, and for most sites, we’ll be putting together 8-10 videos. Typical topics include: logging in and site overview, using the WordPress editor, adding to the navigation menus, sidebars and other hard to reach places, etc.

We’ll also generally make a video for each of the custom content types on your sites as well. This step gives us an opportunity to doublecheck and make sure that everything’s working as it should on the frontend and on the backend, and I’ll often find a bug or two while making these videos.

Here’s a real-world example from a recent project: