Build Website Design Plan Like an Agency

Step #1 - Find Out What Your Customers Want

To build a website that will drive conversions and attract new visitors, you've got to understand your ideal customers. That sounds like a tall order since there are so many attributes that make up your customers. It's difficult to focus on all of them, which is why we use concise strategy templates.

Step #2 - Plan The Strongest Message

Strong messaging goes beyond great copy. It requires a plan of every website page we'll create, and the goal for each page. We begin with initial pages we plan on building, that provide information about our company, discuss our core offers, and educate the customer about our solution.

These pages include:

Entry Pages

The entry pages will be the first impression you'll make on potential customers. These include your home page and various lead generation landing pages. You should go above and beyond on these pages when it comes to developing messaging. 

Content Pillar Pages

These pages take a lot of work, but with a lot of positive effort, they pay off tremendously. With a great concept and excellent content, you can demonstrate your value and expertise in your industry, all while improving your SEO rankings.

Belief Pages

You can find exceptional, engaged customers with belief pages. These pages demonstrate your core values. We're don't skirt over our values to get more customers. We focus on building long-lasting relationships with leads with a similar perspective about websites, and these belief pages help us find them.

Buyer Journey Pages

Buyer journey pages will help get out customers from point A to point B. Over time, we'll rely on buyer journey pages to help increase organic traffic, nurture leads, and bring in more sales opportunities. With highly effective buyer journey pages, motivated customers will move through our funnel faster.

Conversion Pages

These are the pages that sell. These pages provide clarity to your more qualified leads, helping them understand what all of your products and services are, why customers need it, what they'll get from those services, and how to buy it.

When planning which conversion pages you need, think through the products and services you offer. Can they pay for those services online? Can they buy those products online? Do they need to do a demo first?

These questions will help inform where those pages need to link to, and other pages you might need to build.

Legalese

These pages aren't exciting, but they're necessary to have. For these pages, you'll cover Privacy Policy and Terms of Use content to protect your brand. These pages can be a gray area for most people. If you need legalese pages, consult a lawyer, or do your research. Every industry is different, so there's not a one size fits all approach for this part.

After deciding the pages we need, we document them and draft a sitemap. A sitemap looks like a grid and determines the hierarchy of your pages. Which pages will link to the navigation, for example? What pages do we need to support content offers or free trials? 

Step #3 - Save Time On The Style

Let's revisit the diet metaphor for a minute. When thinking about going on a diet, a lot of people focus on the final aesthetic. For example, how they'll look, or what kind of outfits they'll wear once they lose weight. It's similar to traditional web design, where the look of the website is everything. As a result, you put the customer experience, the conversion paths, and messaging on the back burner.

That approach is pretty counterproductive to what we need websites to do now, which is attract potential customers, nurture and qualify leads. What you need is a site that's going to grow with your company, and help you reach your goals. So when you put together a website project plan, the design aspect should be minimal. The majority of your time and budget should go towards the structure and copy of your website.

Once you write, edit, and put website copy into your page drafts, pass them to a designer to style headlines, add images and video, and insert calls-to-actions. 

Step #4 - Launch Fast, Measure & Learn

If you follow our approach to putting together a website project plan, you'll end up with a site that's pretty close to being perfect. However, we never recommend just launching sites and being satisfied with "close to perfect." You should always be optimizing the performance of your website.

Over time, things will break, and customer preferences will change. If you don't pay attention to how the site is performing, eventually, you'll need to do another redesign or refresh. So when we put together our website project plan, we plan to optimize over time. We set goals and objectives for ongoing updates and testing.

Implementing The Website Project Plan

A website is a considerable investment, and that's why it's so important to get it right. By taking a more data-driven, customer-centric approach, you'll build a website that can grow with your company and help hit your goals. So while our website project plan has a lot of moving parts, we're confident that it's the best possible approach to web design.