Designing a website takes planning, organization, and creativity. If it were easy—everyone would be doing it. Here are the steps that MKB Designs uses when working on a website. The steps may change depending on the project, business, parties involved, etc.—but these are the general guidelines.

Getting Started

So you need a website for your small business, organization, association, etc. The first thing you do is request a quote from a web designer. The good news is, most website designers offer free quotes. This gives you the opportunity to shop around.

Once you request a quote with MKB Designs, we'll contact you within 24 hours to gather more information. (This will help us when quoting the ultimate cost of the project.) You'll receive a website questionnaire that is designed to get you thinking about your site in its final state. What color scheme do you want to have? What fonts do you want to use? Do you like dropdown navigation, left navigation, horizantal navigation, etc.? How many pages do you intend on having? There are so many things that need to be thought out when building a website.

After we receive the questionnaire back from you, we'll review it to make sure nothing is missing. Then we get to work figuring out what building your website will cost. You'll hear back from us within a day or two with some solid figures. Depending on the complexity of the request, we may want to schedule a meeting (or conference call) to discuss the requirements and any other questions we may have. We'll also discuss timeframes, expectations, etc.

At the end of this step, you'll receive an offical quote from MKB Designs, along with the service contract for the project. Once we receive approval and sign-off from you, we can get started!

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Creating A Design

In today's business world, most companies have a website. It's the face of their business and people can access it at the click of a button. It's important to have a good design that makes a user want to read more about your company without taking one look and deciding to go elsewhere.

Design can imply many things—colors, navigation, layout, background images, etc. What will the basic theme be for your website? For instance, if your business revolves around pet supplies, you might want all the navigational icons to be various pet supply items and you might want the background to be paw prints.

As part of this process, MKB Designs will use the questionnaire you filled out to come up with some preliminary designs for your website. You'll get several preview links until you're satisfied with the overall design. It may take several back and forth efforts until the final design is decided upon.

At the end of this step you should have a good idea as to what you want this site to look like, and we'll have created a design shell that the rest of the content will be incorporated in to later in the project.

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Building the Site

At this point, we're ready to get down into the nitty gritty. As part of the website questionnaire you fill out in the "Getting Started" step, you'll be asked to provide photos, logos, documents, and any content you want incorporated on the site. We'll use that to get started, but we'll need a lot more information from you to get to the final product.

Providing us the basic information you want displayed on each page is the next step. If we're redesigning your site, this will be easy because we'll have the old site as a starting point. If we're creating a site from scratch you'll be gathering and providing the information for us.

In this step, you may receive several preview links from us to go over page layouts, features, etc. We may schedule weekly conference calls to talk about changes that have occurred since the last conversation. This ensures we're all on the same page, and it leaves little room for unwanted surprises.

At the end of this step we should be getting close to the end of the project.

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Final Tweaks & Delivery

So we've created the design, built all the pages, and incorporated the content. What next?

In the final stages of the project, we'll be coming to you for final updates, changes, etc. We'll basically be fine-tuning your site to get it ready for the public. There shouldn't be any surprises during this phase of the process. Everything should be pretty well put together and you'll have looked it over several times up until this point.

Once we receive the "ok" from you, we'll purchase the website domain name, add keywords and descriptions to all pages, and get it ready for Google Analytics. These are all things necessary to help index your site on the major search engines (i.e. Yahoo!, Google, and Bing). This step is very important because once the site is turned over to you, you'll want to be able to measure success, website traffic, and get a better understaing as to what users are looking for when they ultimately end up at your website.

In the final steps, we'll publish your site to the domain name, deliver all login credentials, files, etc. that pertain to your site so you can take the wheel and steer from then on. Then the site is yours! We've completed our agreement and you should have a final product that you are proud and delighted with!

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