How Web Design works at HeyTony
We take web design seriously. Your website is often the first thing a potential customer interacts with; it should reflect the quality of your business. We design websites to be easy to use, clean, and to convert visitors into customers or clients. Here’s a look into our web design process:
Identifying Your Goal
During our initial web design meeting, we will get an understanding your business model, competition, and most importantly the purpose of your website.
The goal of your website isn’t always what you might think it is. Depending on your business, it may be an avenue to sell products, book an appointment, or to get more information. Businesses often have too many objectives for their website, which confuses visitors and lowers their conversion rates.
Your business model may involve both selling products and services, accompanied by useful information for visitors. It’s our job to make sure we’re not confusing perspective clients with too many navigation buttons, or unclear calls to action.
With your goals clearly defined we move onto step 2: Web Design Research & Planning
Web Design Research & Planning
Now that we know our client’s goals, we go through the process of determining which pages they would like on their website. Examples of pages are: Home, About, Contact, Shop, Services, Blog, etc. If we’re essentially re-skinning a website (same content, different look & feel), we’ll use the existing images and copy. If we’re starting from scratch, we’ll need the client to provide us with copy and images. We do offer copywriting services, but that would require additional budget.
Typically we ask our clients to provide us with links to 3 – 5 websites that they really like. It doesn’t have to be a full website; it could be a specific page, functionality, or even how two elements interact. We want to get an idea of what you’re looking for.
Depending on the budget, we start with creating a wireframe (think skeleton) of your new website, which shows you what the pages will look like, where key elements will be placed, and the overall look and feel of your new website.
The next step is review & approval.
Client Review & Approval
To save time (and money) we may have skipped creating a wireframe and gone directly into a build. This is very common and gives you an even better idea of how your website will look, feel, and function.
Either way, we will go through a review and approval process to make sure we’re on the same page.
With either the wireframe, or version 1 of the website designed, you’ll get a URL of your website for review, notes, and approval.
With your feedback in hand, we will start (or continue) your website build!
Building Your Website
One of the things we keep in mind when building a website is that our clients are not web designers or builders; so the site needs to be very easy and simple to update. We use content management systems (CMS) that are very common and easy to use; even for non-tech-savvy individuals.
In 95% of cases, we’re building your website on the WordPress platform. In the other 5% of cases, we’re using Shopify, Wix, or Sqaurespace.
Why WordPress? Well, it’s the most used CMS in the world. There are a lot of people who know how to use it, and there are endless amounts of support and forums for almost every situation. (43% of websites use WordPress!)
The platform itself is being updated constantly to prevent hackers from accessing websites. Not only that, there are also countless plugins, widgets, and themes.
…Anyways! Once we’ve completed the first version of the website, we do another round (or two) of review & approval until we’re ready to launch.. which is conveniently the next step!
Website Launch
Congratulations! You made it! This is the final step in our website design process; launching the website.
Without getting into the technical aspects, we replace your old website with the new one.
There should be very minimal down time, if any. To prevent any visitors from seeing any kind of error message, we typically launch websites at the point in the day/week that has the lowest amount of visitors.
Now that the new website is launched, we provide our clients with video tutorials explaining how to update specific elements of the website. Again, this isn’t difficult, but we want to make sure that our clients didn’t just pay for something they can’t even update themselves.
We do offer website hosting and website maintenance services for clients interested in a hands off website experience. And who knows! You may even be looking for Local SEO or Search Engine Optimization services… which we also offer!
Our Web Design Results
FAQs
Learn more about Web Design below!
“What is web design?” is a question we have been asked in the past. It might seem obvious, but web design is often a separate service from website development. We do both at HeyTony; we want to make the process as easy as possible for our clients.
What goes into Web Design?
The first step of web design is getting an idea of what the client is looking for. They provide us with examples of 3 – 5 websites that they really love, pages that they’d like on their own website, and potentially a few other guidelines.
The next step involves researching your industry, finding additional design examples, and putting together a comprehensive first draft of your website (whether that be a wireframe or version 1 build.)
The last step in the web design portion of a website is approval from the client. Once you’re happy with how the site looks and feels, it gets sent over to web developers. At HeyTony, we do this all in house, so our clients don’t even know this is happening. Hence the confusion between web design & development.
Web Design:
Think of web design as creating a PDF or a Jpeg of a website. It looks like a website, but you can’t use it. This process is the quickest and most budget friendly way to get approval for the look & feel of a website.
Website Development:
Website Development is the process of taking the designed “PDF” and making it into a working website. This is the more technical side of things. If you’re doing something custom, this is where the coding happens. When using a CMS like WordPress, this is where we put together all the elements on the back end; custom coding often happens here as well.
Web hosting is the “hard drive” where your website lives. All of your webiste photos, text, layouts, etc, all have folders on this hard drive.
These hard drives are located in server centres across the world, depending on your processing needs.
If you’re a looking for web hosting in Hamilton, Ontario for example, you would want a server that is based on the east cost as most of your traffic would be coming from this area.
Great question.. it depends!
It depends on how much traffic you’ll be getting and how much processing power your website will need.
Typically for bigger websites with a lot of traffic, you would want a dedicated server. These servers will cost you a lot of money, but will be offset by the revenue generated from the website.
For local businesses, you can get away with using shared hosting. Which is essentially hosting your website on a server with other websites.
Warning: Hosting companies like Bluehost, HostGator, Godaddy, and other popular hosts, are often very slow due to the amount of websites they host on one server. We highly recommending using a website hosting company like CrocWeb.
If you’re wondering why website speed is important, you can read more about why is website speed important?
Yes!
We design and build every website with our clients in mind. You don’t need to know how to code!
The best part about a CMS like WordPress is that even high school students likely have experience building and updating websites with the platform. It’s also used by 43% of websites worldwide, meaning you can easily find someone to help you out if you run into trouble.
We also provide our clients with video tutorials describing how to update specific elements on their websites.
Even if you’re using a template and swapping out the placeholder images and copy, you’re still technically doing web design. Your copy may be longer or shorter than the placeholder copy, and your images might be different aspect ratios, sizes, or colors than the placeholders ones. To make the site look more comprehensive you’ll be editing your margins, padding, and overall spacing on the site. Trust me, this sounds easy, but will drive you nuts!
What our clients are saying
Hey Tony has been a fantastic resource and partner. Matt and the Team have helped us to grow our business and improve our online messaging. I recommend the HeyTony team for online marketing services without hesitation
Jeremy Shell
Meems Media
