7 Steps to a Website You'll Love

At CraftySpace, we aim to take the hassle, confusion, and guesswork out of getting every organization online. We'd like to share our experience with you in the form of these "7 Steps to a Website You'll Love," and hope that they will help you better understand the ins and outs of creating your great website.

Step 1: Branding—Defining and Expressing Your Identity
Your brand is the complete picture of your organization's identity. A strong understanding of your brand can help with many of your future business strategy decisions. 
   
The outcome of the branding process is the creation of a unique and powerful logo and a tagline, as well as some important decisions about the specific words and colors that really capture and express your organization's values. These elements will be used throughout the website, but you may also wish to use them on business cards, letterhead, print advertising and more.
   
Step 2: Marketing Analysis—Developing Your Game Plan
Before embarking on a big project like developing a website, it's important to be very clear as to what you hope to get out of it. Your Marketing Analysis is like a good game plan: it shows you the goal and the way to achieve it.
   
The Marketing Analysis answers these important questions:

  • Why do you want a website?
  • What specific goals is your website trying to accomplish?
  • What strategies are available to help you succeed?
  • How will your target audience find your website?
  • How will you keep them at your site once they find you?
  • What information is most important to your target audience?
  • How can you use your website to develop a relationship with your target audience?
  • What revenue generating ideas can make your site more profitable?

Step 3: Information Architecture—Planning the Structure of Your Site
This step is a bit like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. It means deciding how to group and organize your information so that it can be easily found and utilized by your visitors. You'll need to make decisions about what is most important so that it can be featured most prominently. Together we'll develop a plan for how your visitors will navigate through your site—the goal is to make it effortless!
  
This is also the step where we'll develop page templates for your site. These are page layouts specifically designed to present your information in the most effective way possible. Having your own page templates makes it easy to create great looking new web pages on your own.

Step 4: Graphic Design—Putting it All Together Visually
In this step we develop the graphical look of your website. You'll be presented with an initial design incorporating the colors, language and emotional tone of your brand. All design elements are tailored to the goals of your marketing plan and information architecture. At this point you'll be able to give feedback and make changes to the design. In the end, the design should reflect your organization's unique identity.

At CraftySpace, we aren't satisfied unless you're proud to show off your new site!

Step 5: Content Development—What to Say and How to Say It
In this step we develop the written content that makes up the bulk of each of your pages. Many clients like to do this step on their own, but we also offer professional copy writing and editing services for those who prefer to leave the writing to the writers.

Step 6: Implementation and Support—Bringing Your Site to Life
We use our core technologies to build your website. This includes setting up an easy-to-use content management system so you can upgrade and maintain your own pages. At the end of this step you'll have a fully functioning site that's ready to go!

Although your site is now "done," we won't abandon you. CraftySpace will be there to support you as you begin to get comfortable with your new site. Should you need help, we are only an email or a phone call away.

Step 7: Refining and Extending—Making the Most of Your Online Presence

As your needs grow, it's easy to add new features and functions to your site.

Here's a partial list of great features available to your website:

  • Photo Galleries
  • Flash Animation
  • Video
  • E-mail Newsletters
  • Contact List Management
  • Advertising Management Systems
  • E-commerce
  • Interactive Calendar and Event Management Tools
  • Appointment- or Reservation- Setting Tools
  • Discussion Boards
  • RSS Publishing and Aggregation
  • Donation Management Systems
  • Blogging
  • Client Log-in Area
  • Customized Tools to help you integrate your website with your business processes.
  • If there's anything else you need to make your site sizzle...just let us know!