We’ve seen a trend in the past years of website builders offering customers a 5 minute setup to get online. Tell us who you are, what you sell and ‘boom’, you’ll be online and reeling in the big ones within a week.
The truth is, yes, these do work and they will get you online. And some people might even start making sales quickly. We wish you all the best if you decide to go along that route.
But… of course there is a but.
Services like square space or templates within the Shopify platform and free WordPress themes will probably get you a website which looks ok, or even pretty great. The thing is they will also probably get you a website that looks like everyone who sells the same products as you. It’s boring for the person looking at your website.
The home page will probably look the same and the customer experience will be very basic. People looking at your site might become bored quite quickly or you’ll lose them at the point of sale because they don’t trust in the user-experience in order to press ‘buy’.
We want to do things differently and make sure your website stands out. Which is why we design offline first.
For us, this method is tried and tested, and makes sure that you get a website that you are happy to call your own, something that you are proud of and something that grows your business for years to come.
To design our custom WordPress websites, we work with a software called Sketch. This program is like a graphic design tool specifically for web design which allows us to create something that looks exactly how we, and you, want it to look. This allows us to have a lot of freedom over how something is designed before we develop it and offers a lot of creativity.
So let’s go through the typical experience of designing and developing a website with Digital Nomad Design.
Typical Process for Web Design & Development
- You submit everything you have already. This means all your text content, photos and graphics, high-resolution versions of your logos, branding guidelines and just about anything else you think of that could be useful to us. We’ll use this information to create a content guide and sitemap. We also use this to understand who you are, and what your product or brand should feel like. This gives us a creative direction and a clear road map ahead.
- Next, we enter the design phase. We create ‘static’ web designs offline which help you understand the look and feel of the design we are putting forward. This part of the process is very flexible and gives us a lot of room for creativity.
- Once we all agree on the design, we start building the website within WordPress or Shopify, and we can help you understand the benefits of both of these.
- With all the pages and content in place, we will go through and user-test everything on different devices to make sure everything looks good, reads well and works effectively. The world is full of different kinds of screen sizes, and we need to find a solution that works for all of them.
- You’ll then be given the full site to road test yourself. This is where clear feedback is really important to make sure no details are missed.
- We will encourage you to share this within your circles for feedback, but not too broadly. Too much feedback can slow down progress. We’ll take the feedback, make refinements and conduct another round of testing across different devices.
- The last phase will be to launch the site and link it to your domain.
- Once the site is live, we will set up web analytics so that you can monitor how your audience engages with the website. After a few weeks, we can talk again about what works and what doesn’t and plan how best to work together to manage the website.
For us, it’s not necessarily about custom-coded, totally out-of-the-box design. It’s about web design that is clean and uncomplicated, engaging and intuitive. It’s about creating a design that helps your brand, products and services stand out and developing in a way that ensures the best user-experience.
If you are looking for a new website or to update an existing one, and want to work with a design-led team, then get in touch today.