Custom Designed Website Checklist

Website Design is complicated. There’s a bunch of stuff that needs to go from the client to the coder and visa versa.

When we decide to start a new website my clients typically like a little direction as to what they need. While everyone is going to be a little different here’s an attempt to get you going on the right path.

Hosting

While it may sound like I’m putting the cart before the horse, you’ll see why. For most sites I build, a simple shared hosting account works just fine. Remember that I want you to OWN this. That could be costing you less than $5 a month. There’s quite a few choices out there (here’s five) but I can say I’ve been really happy with GreenGeeks. Servers are huge suckers of energy – GreenGeeks sources all of it’s power from wind power! They have a negative 300% carbon footprint! How cool is that?

You don’t need all the bells and whistles with a hosting account – just stick with the simplest plan.

Prepay your plan at least 1 year in advance. Why? Google looks at the hosting length for sites. Spam sites will host for a month. We don’t want to look like a spam site in Google’s eyes – do we?

Generally when you start to setup hosting the first question they’ll ask is “Do you have a domain name”. If you already do (and let’s assume it’s pointed at something else right now) you can still set up hosting for that name, we’ll build the site, and when we’re happy, we change the domain name servers to point to our new site and you are LIVE! If you don’t already have a domain name, many hosts will automatically waive the registration fees for it with your hosting account! Did I just save you a few ‘Hamiltons”? There’s a tip jar over there in the sidebar.

Domain Name

Pick a domain name. Try to get one that’s reflective of what you do, short, easy to spell and easy to remember. In most cases I suggest trying to get it in a .com as that’s what people look for first, however there are times the other options work better (thinking of things like ma.tt or like if you’re in the fishnet building business you naturally might go .net). The new options that are coming out might sound cool but are just eye candy. Resist as best you can.

NOTE: Contrary to what you may have heard, you don’t HAVE to have your keywords in your domain name. AreWeConnected.com rates high for things WordPress and Facebook Page related and obviously doesn’t contain either. If you are in real estate I suggest thinking along the lines of the geographical areas you serve, or your name if that’s a ‘brand’. Remember, you can always get additional domain names and point them to this site later.

The Site Map

It helps to go into this with a plan, a map, a guideline. Your site map is just that. We’re not talking about the SiteMap that I’ll implement that will automatically update Google and Bing on new posts and pages. Think of this one as a flowchart of sorts. Here’s a simple one for a real estate client, done in Google Docs. Click HERE to see it.

That’s easy enough right? This will help you identify most of the pages you’ll need content for.

Calls To Action

This should be easy. When I am on your website, what do you want me to do? Think of the goals you have set for this site. Do you want them to purchase something, contact you, fill out a form? Your site could have multiple CTAs. My site has three. I want to build you a website, I want to build you a Facebook Page App, and in case you are not quite ready I want to ‘incubate’ you for a while so I want you sign up for my Newsletter. All three are listed in that order on my sidebar as well as on the HOME page.

The Home Page

Chances are I’m going to build your site using WordPress as the backbone with Genesis as the Framework. There are tons of themes out there (click HERE to see a bunch). Don’t get all caught up in colors and fonts yet, all that can be changed.

Today each theme has a few templates that make it work. One of those is the HOME Page. The HOME Page is generally going to behave differently than the rest of your site. Think of it like the cover of a magazine. It might contain beautiful images, hints and teasers that pull people deeper into your site depending on what grabs them.

Now that you have a general sitemap, what ‘Elements’ do you want on your HOME page? Start at the top, above the fold. Is there a ‘Slider‘ – with rotating images? Or does it have something like tiles – linking deeper to particular sections? AreWeConnected.com has a video front and center explaining what I do and what I write about.

Scrolling down the page is there more, maybe smaller teasers? There doesn’t have to be. SalesQualia stopped right there. Every person is different, every site is different.

At the bottom we’ll find the Footer. It’s that section that shows up on every page, every post. What do you want in your footer? Is there a menu bar? Contact Info? How many sections do you need in the footer?

What we’ve just been working on are just elements. These are typically elements included in a theme, but not always. Deciding on what ‘Elements’ you want on the home page helps me decide what theme to start modding. Does that make sense?

The Sidebar

Once the get past your HOME Page, chances are you’ll have a sidebar. From top to bottom what do you want there? Generally speaking, a few good things to have there would be your contact information followed by your Calls to Action. On my sidebar you’ll see I do just that. There’s still a search and recent posts and categories and tags and all those other things… but the most important stuff (to you and to them) needs to be at the top.

Style, Color, Fonts, Graphics, Gizmos

And on and on… Generally speaking you already have a preconceived notion of what it is you want. That might be light and sparse (like Apple) or perhaps something with beautiful background imagery (like a Parallax site). You have a few other sites you admire. Send me links to those sites. Be ready, the first thing I’m going to ask is what it is in particular you ‘like’ about each.

Start collecting your assets. These are things like a graphic you had created for a business card, your profile image, your company logo. Go back to each page you listed in your sitemap – you’ll need images for each of those.

Colors, accents, backgrounds and even fonts can all be changed in themes. If you have a logo we’re using we can generally pick out accent colors to match it.

Copy

Copy is that text stuff. Copy is what I need to put on each of those pages on your sitemap. Assemble that for each Page and send it to me in a word doc. For each Call to Action you may need copy for those pages as well.

What to do next

Let me tell you how I work. I work on one thing at a time. No multitasking for me. In a perfect world I would love to have everything, all at once, ready to go. I’d love to have that all in a shared dropbox folder. In this way I could jump on the project and knock it out in record time. That’s my perfect world and I know it’s not yours and I get that. Start with what you can easily put together. That might be a scribbled napkin with a sitemap, a few sites you like, and the logo from your business card. I can get most of the basic work done, fill in the pages with dummy text (Lorem Ipsum).

What NOT to do next

Don’t sit and wait. Don’t hesitate. While it might seem like a daunting task – it’s achieved one step at a time. You can do this. I’ll do all the hard technical stuff you just get me the easy stuff.

The other thing I would rather you did not do is to send me one thing at a time. Collect a bunch of stuff and get it to me in batches.

Does this list help? Am I missing anything?

Not a client (yet?) Here’s your chance. YES!My business needs the tools and techniques of a properly built site

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Mike Mueller

A former professional hand model, Mike now builds Custom WordPress Blogs that rock!

He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one,bought a cool orange one, and still rides a really slow one), he loves strong beer and good red wine.