At Ideawörks, we strongly believe that a modern, unique website is crucial to communicate who you are to your audience while also distinguishing yourself from the competition. Our website projects range in scale and scope depending on who we’re working, but for the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus on our process for developing WordPress websites.

Roughly a third of all websites that exist are built in WordPress, and while other services like Squarespace and Wix offer simple drag-and-drop, templated options, WordPress gives you way more flexibility with the variety of themes and plugins available. Unlike its competitors, WordPress isn’t just easy-to-use, websites built on the platform are fully customizable.

7 Steps to Website Development:

Discovery:  At this stage, we’re getting to know each other. We want to find out what makes you tick, what unique message you’re trying to get across and how we can help you get there. We’ll ask plenty of questions to make sure we have a crystal clear idea of who you are and what you want so we can develop a cohesive strategy to deliver it.

Design: Now we get creative. We’ll take your brand standards and any requests you have or create some suggestions based on what we learned in the ‘Discovery’ stage. Fonts, colors, graphics, photos and copy, all coalescing in one beautiful Adobe XD file. In this stage, we work on telling your story in a visually compelling way that will attract and resonate with your audience. Once the full website design is ready, we’ll schedule a design review meeting with you to look it over and make sure it meets (and surpasses) your expectations.

Development: Once we have your blessing, we’ll will take the designs and bring them to life by programming them. We’ll build your website to be in accordance with the latest best practices, making sure it’s secure, speedy and responsive to fit all screen sizes.

QA & Testing: Your new website needs to look pretty—but more importantly—it needs to provide site visitors with a good user experience. At this stage, we’ll run usability tests and review the entire site in-depth. We’ll review the site in multiple browsers, different screen sizes, identify and fix any broken links, bugs or glitches and any other issues that might detract from the overall website experience.

Client Review: This one’s on you. Your brand-new website is ready… almost. At this stage, we ask you to take a look and let us know what you think. Don’t hold back, this is your chance to let us know exactly how you feel about your website so we can make any final adjustments/revisions ahead of launch.

Training: One of the main reasons we choose to build websites in WordPress is its simplicity and accessibility. Once you’re happy with the site, we’ll schedule a brief training session to show you the back-end of your website and how to make content updates. You can still leave the more advanced SEO optimizations and maintenance to us, but at least this way, you won’t have to call or email every time you want to make a simple change.

Always Improving: At this stage, the website is technically complete, but a real website developer’s work is never done. Whether it’s new optimization features, plugin updates or new technology, this stage is a continuing cycle of testing, optimizing and improving the website. Your website is often the first thing people see when they search for a product, brand or company so it’d better look great.