How to get started

I am writing this as a helpful guide for clients who would like a quote.  The best way to obtain an accurate quote is to be very clear about what it is that you want your website to do.

Step 1 – Map Out Your Site

Start by storyboarding your website.  Grab a big piece of white paper (e.g. use a scrapbook or sketchbook) and with some Post-It Notes map out each page of your site on a separate sheet of paper.

Start with your top-level pages which are things like:

• Home
• About Us or About Me
• Services
• Products
• Pricing
• Contact page
• Blog Articles
• Photo Gallery
• Testimonials
• Any other top-level pages you can think of.

Make a Post-It note label for each page so you know what page you are working on.

After you’ve labelled your pages, work on one page at a time with some basic ideas.

Use your Post-it Notes to rough out what information will be on each page, e.g. one Post-it Note might say “Picture here” and another might say “Text there”.  Another might say “video here”.  Don’t get too hung up on where things go.  Concentrate on what information should be on each page.

The idea is to make a Post-it Note for every section of the page so that when it comes to putting your content together, you already have a roadmap.

Once you’ve mapped out your Top-Level pages, create new pages for any lower level pages, for example, under Products, you might have three pages such as Product 1, Product 2 and Product 3.

Where you have nested pages like that, create a Post-it Note storyboard for those pages as well.

Step 2 – Put Your Content Together

Now that you’ve created a Roadmap for your new website, start working on your content.  Over the next few weeks, grab one Post-it Note at a time and work on that job.  When it’s completed grab another.  You can put your Content together for your website in between other jobs like talking to your customers.  Before you know it, you will have put together all the content for your new website.

For each section of text, you could put together a series of Word Documents with that text on it.  Also, gather up or purchase any stock images you want to use, as well as any videos you want displayed.

Create a website folder on your computer.  Then create a folder for each page in your main website folder.  Add all the text and images for each page into their relevant folders as you work on them.

Don’t forget to put all your Logos in a separate folder as well.

You can then use DropBox or Google Drive to share that content with me.  You can also email me your content for review – whatever is the easiest for you.

Step 3 – Get a Quote

Once you’ve put your content together, I can give you a much better and more accurate quote. By sharing your content on Google Drive or DropBox, or emailing it to me, I can view it and provide an estimate of costs.

Step 4 – Building Stage

Once I have everything I need, and you have given me the go-ahead, I can start building your new site.  When the site is finished and you have approved it, we can then implement it.

Step 5 – Implementation

Once the site is approved for live status by the client, I will migrate your new site to its new hosting, and reset your email accounts.

At this stage, I will require the Login Information for your Domain Name so please make sure you’ve also got that before starting the project.