Design Museum Foundation
The Design Museum Foundation new website provides a fully mobile experience that allows for the organization to create new regional chapters on the fly.
It’s Just Five Steps
I’ve spent almost two decades working in digital agencies all across the city, and with every new website I build, I learn something new. But the fundamental process I use to build websites—despite the constant influx of new web technologies, techniques, and methodologies invented and reinvented every quarter—remains tried and true.
Discovery
I don’t like surprises, and I’m sure you don’t either. In Discovery, I learn about your business and analyze your competition to determine market opportunities on the web. I get to know what you want to do. I learn about your values, your tastes, and your personality. If you’re in the area, let’s meet face-to-face.
For service providers like agencies, this may mean involving me early in your conversations with your client, so that we can best plan for your pitch. For businesses and entrepreneurs, we talk scope and plan out what’s feasible within your time and budget constraints.
User
Experience
In this phase, I plan the architecture of your site and determine the best experience for your users. This involves devising logical hierarchies for your content and implementing user interface best practices that make navigating your website intuitive to users. Depending upon the needs of your project, I may invite an expert user experience designer to join the team so that they can best execute on this phase.
The end result is the creation of a sitemap and wireframes that we can refer back to as we move into the next steps. The sitemap allows us to map out the relationship between types of content in your website, whereas the wireframe is a barebones skeleton of your website’s structural layout, indicating what goes where and how it all fits together.
Visual Design
During the visual design phase, I often team up with a local visual designer who works in tandem with me to carry over the strategies we developed in the Discovery and User Experience phases. We mock up a design of key pages in your website, called a storyboard. Usually, this means designing your front page, pages with unique layouts, and your Gutenberg block library.
Your website’s visual design is its outer shell, exactly what your users will see and interact with once your website goes live. In Visual Design, all our abstract efforts earlier on are realized in a visual layout for the first time. You have the opportunity to tweak elements of the design, implement changes, or suggest an entirely different direction for your website’s look and feel.
Development
When I slice apart your website’s design and code it up for the web, you can rest assured that its markup is performant, semantic, and search engine-friendly. My best practices are in line with the latest web standards, which results in an end product that is cross-browser compatible and optimized for speed.
By building on top of the WordPress content-management system, I empower you completely to control your content after it goes live. You can update the website and create new pages whenever you want, from any web browser, code-free.
Deployment
In the last leg of the process, we move your website to a dotcom of your own. I help you navigate the process of purchasing your dotcom and selecting a web host best suited for your build. You can also host directly with me and enjoy all the benefits of a managed hosting environment at an incredibly low cost.
Depending on the complexity of your site, the Deployment phase may involve an exhaustive quality assurance process, wherein my production assistants populate your site with real content to surface bugs. If you’re undergoing accessibility testing, we’ll also perform remediation at this stage. In the end, we set up an ecosystem of staging and production servers, test against performance benchmarks, and coordinate local environments for your in-house development team.
After launch, you’ll be able to log in to your website from the WordPress Dashboard and manage your content without having to think about all the hoops I had to jump through to get you there.
Get a Free Consultation
When it comes to specialized work, hire battle-tested experts to get the job done right. I’ll build a platform that takes care of your brand, so you can get back to building your business. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. A consultation is free, and we can determine over a quick phone call if I’m a good fit for your project.
From My Portfolio
Health Leads
Nearly everything in the Health Leads WordPress theme is configurable by site administrators for a non-technical editing experience.
Argus Communications
Using WordPress, I created a theme that allowed the agency’s small team to get hands-on with their portfolio content while preserving the unique layout of their website’s design.
