4 Foundational Steps To Building A Killer Website

Close your eyes and count with me: 1, 2, 3, 4 and poof!

Your website is live, and all you did was press a magic button, tell it what you wanted and in a jif, you got exactly what you wanted. Now you can sit back and let it do all the work for you. Does this process sound familiar to you?

I didn't think so.

As a graphic designer who works in web design fairly often, I’ve learned that it's not just one part that comes into play. There are a lot of moving pieces when creating a website.

Here are the four most essential pieces I have discovered to help you create a high-quality, functioning and great-looking website.

How To Create A Killer Website

Strategy

Without a guide, Lewis and Clark would have never seen the Pacific Ocean. And without someone who is skilled at web design, you’re probably not going to get the best product.

Web design is more than just putting together a clean and modern design that works across various platforms and devices. There is a whole set of strategies that come along with it.

We need to find out what your goal for your users are, and what their goals are when coming to your site. We do this learning by learning your brand’s goals.

At ROI Online, we fill out a StoryBrand BrandScript and do an intake interview to find out what your success looks like for your end user.

Design

Now that we have our plan, we know what we want to say and how we are going to execute it. This is my favorite part, but now we get to figure out how this should look. Before we start adding animated effects to all of our hyperlinks and slowing down our site with tons of animation, let's remember who we are building this site for.

We begin our design process with a website wireframe to ensure a very linear process to educate users. We have a framework we follow as well, which helps us make sure we are creating proper funnels for our users. After the wireframe, we create full mockups of how your site will look and feel.

Development

Now that we have the look for your site, we have to bring it to life. We build custom websites using HubSpot’s COS. Our development team creates custom modules you can edit with ease. While we get these pages set up and created, we also QC all of our pages along the way so when it is time to launch, everything is in place.

Launch

Now that we have clarified your brand’s message and created a beautiful, functional website, we can go live!

Once we launch our website, we enter a more hidden step, which we call the Continuous Improvement Phase. With HubSpot analytics tools, Google Analytics and HotJar at our disposal, we can discern what your users are doing on your site and make improvements based on their patterns and habits.