The website-making process

Accurately identifying your target market and understanding their needs is one of the most important components of a successful business. If you can identify who you are targeting and how you can service them, you are well on your way to making your business a success.

By understanding who your customers are and how they behave, you can identify marketing methods, advertising campaigns and customer service strategies that will resonate with your audience. This insight will enable you to develop an effective digital marketing strategy and thrive in the online marketplace.

Your target market demographics will also directly influence your brand, including aspects like logo design and colors.

Every brand has a "voice" that represents your company's personality. This voice should be used consistently across your marketing materials, including videos and written copy.

Is your brand friendly and personable? Down-to-earth and professional? Or something else altogether? Deciding your brand's voice ties in with all the other branding decisions you have made, and forms part of your brand's unique persona.

Once you've chosen your brand's voice, we can work together with a professional copywriter to develop marketing copy. "Copy" in this context refers to written snippets and paragraphs that can be used on your website, product descriptions, brochures, etc. Together with your logo and other design elements, this marketing copy will be a valuable asset for your business for years to come!

At this point you have your brand and foundational materials prepared, and you're ready to hit the ground running!

Depending on your specific business needs, we can prepare and print materials such as:

• Business cards
• Brochures
• Letterhead for invoices, and legal docs
• Envelopes, branded checks

A cornerstone strategy of modern business marketing strategy is to use your marketing channels to drive leads onto your website, where you can then qualify and convert the leads into new customers.

While your new website begins the design and development process, we can setup a branded placeholder website in the meantime. Leads from your physical and social media marketing efforts can then be directed to this page for the time being, which will work great for your first clients as you start out.

Meanwhile, we'll be hard at work setting up your full-fledged website behind-the-scenes.

A content management system ("CMS") unlocks the ability for your in-house staff to freely edit your website pages and content at any time. It's freeing and powerful to have this control over your website without needing help from a developer to make straightforward wording changes, etc.

At Decimis we specialize in our highly polished CMS customizations that make content editing as easy as possible for your staff. Even popular systems like WordPress come out-of-the-box with a dizzying array of options, and we take great pride in going the extra mile to cleanup the editing experience and take the headache out of website updates.

Our new clients frequently ask about what content management system ("CMS") is right for their business. We're happy to work with your company to find the best fit for your needs. Some common frameworks we've implemented in the past are:

• WordPress
• Contentful
• Prismic
• CraftCMS
• Custom-built

The next step in the design process is making wireframes of the user interface (UI). This step is frequently combined with the user interview process to help fine-tune the website design based on user feedback.

Depending on the complexity of your website project, a UI/UX designer will create a number of wireframes that illustrate potential pages of your future website. These wireframes are usually low fidelity sketches that show where different page elements, content, images, and features will be placed on the webpage.

As with all the design stages, this step is highly collaborative and usually involves several rounds of feedback between the designers and your company.

The wireframing stage is a big time-saver as the project progresses, since it's much easier for the designer to alter a rough sketch compared to redesigning full mockups or redeveloping a built webpage.

The "Backend" of a website represents the code behind-the-scenes that makes your website run. It's invisible to anyone who visits your website, but represents the critical infrastructure that supports the site.

This step can be expected to take up roughly half of the total development time for the project. In general, the backend is easy to cut corners since it isn't usually seen by customers or staff, however at Decimis we take great pride in our attention to detail on setting this part up properly. A well-built backend is like the engine of a car, so building it right the first time will increase your website's longevity and save on maintenance costs over time.

Once the backend and frontend foundation are ready, work can begin on the individual page components. A component represents a reusable page block like a Photo, Text Block, or Contact Form. Combining these components together then results in a full webpage.

The components are built to be mobile-responsive and to work well alongside any other component on the page. This step is a favorite both for our developers as well as for our clients, as this is usually the first checkpoint where you get to test a live preview of your upcoming website!

Finally, the web developers will polish everything up in your new website codebase. From SEO (search engine optimization) and page loading speed, to ADA compliance (website accessibility), there are many items to be verified and checked for quality assurance before we launch your new site.

This is another step that's easy to cut corners on or skip altogether since the effects are hidden up-front. At Decimis we take great care to ensure all of these polishing steps are taken care of accurately so that you end up with a high quality website without hidden issues. We also keep you well-informed at every step along the way, and are happy to show you what's going on behind-the-scenes if you're interested!