CLEAR COMMUNICATION

Helps Building websites on time and on budget.

We Don't Move FOrward
unless we BOTH CAN:

See eye to eye on goals. Designing a semi-custom website is a collaborative effort. I'm not a mind reader or an expert in your domain or profession, so your input is crucial to a successful outcome.

Make decisions comfortably. The diagrams and prototypes I present are designed to focus our dialogue on what's relevant at each step. I try to reduce uncertainty around design and give you confidence about your decisions.

Provide deliverables on schedule. Each phase offers easy breakpoints if you need to pause, reassess the project, commission new assets like photographs or copy. All payments and deliverables are aligned with these phases.

Communicate about roadblocks. Life happens. I respond within 3 business days to your emails, and I expect the same. Our contract aligns with the prototype's 6-month expiration date. This is also enough time for a motivated client to create or procure content for a small website.

WHY WORK WITH ME?

art

There is an art to designing a layout that looks good on different devices.

technique

There is a technique to structuring your content that is accessible non-visually.

Dialogue

The dialogue between you and me creates a better product than either of us working solo :)

SAMPLE PROCESS

THE Contract

Our initial conversations about your website's purpose, size, and how we are going to work together are detailed:

SCOPE

This is an upper bound on the pages, page types, integrations, forms, images, and design revisions.

DELIVERABLES

We detail both our mutual responsibility for providing deliverables and communicating in a timely manner.

MILESTONE PAYMENTS

Key milestones and their connection to payments are spelled out.

REVISIONS &
CHANGES

A limited number of revisions are included in the contract. Subsequent ones will be handled with a change order and will proceed only with your approval and payment.

The engagement is confirmed once the contract is signed and the initial deposit clears.

DISCOVERY

A strong design comes from reaching a mutual understanding of your business goals and your website users' needs, finding the right balance between them, and then distilling them into a clear set of design goals.

You get what you put in. At a minimum you should provide:

LOGO

Ideally in a vector format like SVG that preserves detail at all sizes. If a raster image, PNG format and at least 600 pixels wide. It should have accurate colors, and transparency to make it usable over different color backgrounds. If consistency with the logo is important, tell me what font you used.

BRAND
COLORS

Color-accurate scans or artwork of business cards or other marketing materials. Paint colors used in your place or business.

COPY

This initial draft should communicate: total number of pages, the type of pages desired, and any forms, tables, lists, or other types of texts besides paragraphs.

GRAPHICS

The closer any placeholders are to the end product, the less guesswork. For reference a full-screen banner need a resolution of at least 2500 pixels wide.

REFERENCES

Links to other websites should include competitors if they are outside your geographic area and websites with an inspiring appearance or approach to content.

You will need to communicate why what you are providing is relevant to the new website. I can pick colors, fonts, and organize your content in several appealing and internally logical ways, but without an understanding of your site's purpose and who it's serving, the exercise is a waste of your time and money.

In our first meeting, we discuss your business context, the role your website plays in it, and how you see the images and copy you provided working in your website.

About a week later, we'll discuss your project with the following:
‍

DESIGN BRIEF

Describes an achievable design approach to achieve your business goals.

CONTENT AUDIT

Describes drop-in ready content and what you need to create. Also shows the page and folder structure or Information Architecture.

ROADMAP

If you have a definite launch date, I will create a calendar with deliverables and deadlines to hit that date.

DESIGN

Websites are not static images; they have to work on a variety of devices. Consumer-oriented website builders like Squarespace have limitations out of the box and on what can be customized.

I design in the browser on Carrd and Squarespace projects so we can efficiently get as close as possible to the final website to guide design decisions on the following:

KEY PAGES

These are working pages using the best available content. Typically home page, contact, about, and services.

NAVIGATION

Links to active key pages and empty placeholders for the rest.

COLORS

Satisfying both branding and accessibility needs.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Right balance of page and folder breadth and depth. Heading structure on the key pages.

REVISIONS

Each project has a fixed number of revisions. The total is agreed upon beforehand depending on the client's needs and the website platform.

Changes are best communicated in a timely manner during a design presentation or collected in a single email within 3 business days while our conversation is still fresh in everyone's mind. I'm not going to interrupt your day with multiple emails on design updates and I expect the same in return.

Each platform and design is different, but to provide some context on what drives the prices behind a change order:

MAJOR

Major revisions typically require building new prototypes or new page types. Layout changes that include code-modified components are in this category. These types of changes need to be compared with the previous version due to site-wide dependencies or several minor and trivial changes. They will be accommodated with a change order.

MINOR

Examples of minor revisions include coding overrides to platform components or creating an additional page based on an existing collection or page type. These changes require testing at different screen sizes but can be evaluated independently of other elements. A large number of trivial revisions can also add up to a minor revision.

TRIVIAL

Trivial revisions typically can be handled in the interface without affecting the rest of the site. In some cases, they will be handled during a live review.

BUILD OUT

Integrating your final content into the live website typically takes a few weeks as most clients need the time to source images or refine their copy. after a last set of tweaks we will make it visible to the public.

I upload your final content into the live website.

YOU PROVIDE

FINAL COPY

Proofread and typo-free.

FINAL GRAPHICS

Color-correct graphics and photographs.

DOWNLOADS

PDFs and other documents that will be hosted on the site.

I FINALISE

The gory details of what I do at this point include:

ALT-TEXT

Descriptions of every image for screenreaders and SEO.

META DESCRIPTION

Short 50-160 character summaries of each page that show up on the search engine results page.

PRIVACY & TOS PAGE

Content that reflects your website and other service providers' Terms of Service. Descriptions of the analytics used and how they conform to California's privacy laws.

IMAGE TWEAKS

Adjusting colors, size, format, compression for the best balance of quality, speed, file size.

DESIGN TWEAKS

Refining spacing and sizing of graphic elements, headings, texts, lists, tables, and forms on desktop and mobile views.

REDIRECTS

301 redirects of old page URL's to the appropriate new locations.

THIRD-PARTY SERVICES

Integrating any third-party services in their final form.

DOMAIN SETUP

Connecting your website's domain name to the actual site.

SEARCH SETUP

Registering your sites new location with Google Search Console so your clients find the right site.

ANALYTICS SETUP

Connecting your website to Google Analytics so we have a measure of where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing onsite.

Before going public, we'll review the site together and fix issues like typos and missing punctuation that happened during the final content uploads.

POST LAUNCH

Websites are not set in stone. I encourage all my clients to take ownership of their sites and get into the habit of making changes themselves. You are not thrown into the deep end of the pool. I'm here to help you succeed.

EIGHT HOURS HELP

All projects include 8 one-hour remote sessions to help with:

SITE INTERFACE

Walk you through site interface and how to update content yourself.

DOCS

Navigate the provider's documentation.

MINOR CHANGES

Address minor revisions.

THREE MONTHS MONITORING

Support also includes 3 months:

VISITOR TRAFFIC

Monitoring visitor traffic and behavior.

SEARCH RESULTS

Addressing issues with your website's appearance on Google search results pages. On redesigns, I take a conservative approach and suggest changes that will maintain your current rankings.