Building a Website with a Marketing Agency

First, we need to understand the goals of your business. Why are you building a new website? What updates do you plan on incorporating? What is the end goal for this new website? Take some time to think about, and write down, the reasons you have for this decision. Also think about the audience of your website. You may want to target a new demographic of people in your neighborhood or at your online store.

Next, look at a few of your competitor’s sites and start to brainstorm how you would want to create competition against them. If a business you know in your industry has a robust ecommerce section where customers can order things online and you want something like that, write it down. Planning WHAT you want will help outline the whole process in the next set of steps.

When you finally have your notes and ideas gathered it’s time to contact a marketing agency that offers website development, preferably a full-service marketing agency that can handle all the graphics, pictures, SEO, etc.

Once you are talking with the agency you picked you will need to have an ideation session with them. It’s normal to show them the ideas you have, and bounce around the pros and cons of certain features, depending on your industry. These features you ultimately pick will be turned into something called a “Site Map” and this tells a web developer how many pages to use, what to title each page, what to make the URL, what links to where, etc.

Once you see the sitemap you will notice these lines interconnecting the pages of your site. These are called “wireframes” that display the flow of the website and where each page can lead the user. This is to understand the “flow” of the website and how it will guide people to find what they need.

Now that you have the map established it’s time to start creating content ideas, the bread and butter of any website. This is the “stuff” you have to offer, from tools to products to information. This is also the step where you plan to migrate content from an existing site if you have one. There is no need to reinvent the wheel if you have content from an old website.

As you collaborate with your marketing agency you’ll be deciding the color schemes, fonts, etc. The benefit of a marketing agency is they will help you create brand guidelines that can be used on all projects, social media graphics, everything across all platforms to maintain consistency. A solo web developer might not know how to create an entire brand guideline.

There will be a lot of mockups. Really, there is going to be a solid chunk of the development process of review and approval between you and the marketing agency. This usually starts with only a few pages, and it is to get the general aesthetic of the website in place so when future pages are made, they match cohesively. This will allow you to gather their feedback on something that might not be working, and for you to tell them something isn’t working as well. It’s important to finalize the design before moving into building the entire website, trust us.

The design will also help your marketing agency modify the responsive design. This is the single most important facet to search engine optimization as Google will not show your website to a mobile device unless it is responsively designed. This includes a huge amount of testing between the desktop and mobile versions of the site. A good user experience on a mobile device is incredibly important.

Then once the design has been finalized, we will move into the development phase. This is a large break for you because it will take time for the developers at the marketing agency to create and adapt all the pages from your sitemap and wish list.

Creating good copy for a website is a science, it is an actual career. Making sure the words on the page register on Google is important, and a huge chunk of development will be crafting and refining the verbiage to cater to certain keywords. This is the bread and butter of search engine optimization. The content needs to align with your vision of your brand and visuals.

The media used on your website will also be important. There will be many placeholders until the final product, but if you want certain pictures make sure to get them to your marketing agency, if not they will find images on websites like Pexels or Shutterstock. The trick with media is to ensure they do not take up too much bandwidth when loading a site. Pictures are often compressed or lowered in resolution to save time when loading your website’s pages.

Lastly, your marketing agency will set up a content management system, like WordPress, as they are building your website. This helps organize all the pages, the pictures on them, the links, everything. This is handy because you might lose a file on your computer when it gets buried in your downloads folder. Now they’re all located in one spot attached to your website as long as it’s up and running.

(These steps are a little different if you are transferring an old site to a newer platform or something, but generally the process here is the same.)

Here it is. Now that the marketing agency has taken care of the technological feat of composing and modifying every page of the website it is sent to you on a test platform to scour the depths of your creation. You and the entire marketing team will begin trying to break anything and everything on the site on any platform you can manage. Here at Acclaim we even have a laptop from 2007 that still runs just to see how the loading time is on older devices.

While many people are trying to find any bugs or loose ends the web developers will probably be laying the groundwork for search engine optimization on the front end of the site. This is called “on-page SEO” These include image alt-text, metatags, and meta descriptions. This is the last step before the final review and green light for your site.

Now, the final moment has come to push the “publish” button and launch the site. Even the best web developers will tell you that things will not be perfect, nothing ever is. Even with testing, running it through stress tests, and booting up old devices to see where it fails, there still may be something overlooked. The development team will undoubtedly monitor and test things while live and update the website actively in the beginning. This might seem frustrating, but it is absolutely part of the process. You want to find anything that could go wrong early in the website’s life.

After the heat has died down a little bit there will be a calm period. This is where the development team will either coach you and your team on how to operate and navigate the back end of the site to update it with blogs/pictures/social posts, or you will hand it off to the marketing agency completely and send them regular content updates.

This is the end. You made it. Your site should be active and launched with minimal issues, and if any issues arise you are early enough to fix them as the site hasn’t been around long enough to cause integral failure to your business or brand. Plus, it’s almost exciting for web developers to find rare or odd failures, odds are they will be excited to investigate and solve the problem for them.