New Website Design Project Workflow

Overview

Your website can be the most powerful tool for promoting your business and improving the workflow that would make a lot of common administrative tasks far more efficient. To make the most of this opportunity, you need to make sure you have optimize your website to both impress your visitors visually and also funnel visitors to your conversion goals. This requires careful planning.

The return on investment will be different for every business, so you will need to figure out the right cost/benefit balance. Keep in mind Pareto's Principle (the 80/20 rule) when making these calculations. In many cases, a simple upgrade will result in a beautiful new website that costs very little (e.g. $1000-2500). So for 20% you will have a really good website that will get the job done. But for an extra 80% you could do a a major project that will give you a unique website that results in a competitive edge. But depending on your market, that edge may not be necessary or give sufficient ROI.

We can help you determine the return on investment, based on your budget, to help you focus your work on the elements that make the biggest impact.

Below is an overview of the Standard Project Workflow, with very general recommendations and estimates of costs. You will determine whether you want to invest more or less in certain areas, according to the cost/benefit ratio that you determine, and your budget. You can also determine what parts you want to do in-house, what parts Gutensite can help with, and what parts we need to find third party partners that specialize in this (e.g. Content Writing, SEO, etc).

STEPS FOR (RE)DESIGNING YOUR SITE

See our Pricing Section for Details.

  1. Site Planning Consultation: $500-2500
  2. Content Strategy: $500-2500+
  3. SEO Strategy: (Third Party Costs, TBD)
  4. Content Writing: (Third Party Costs, TBD)
  5. Site & Content Setup: $0 - $1000+
  6. Design: $500 - $10,000+
  7. Functionality: $0-1000
TOTAL ESTIMATE:  $1,500 - $17,000+

Site Planning Consultation: $500-2,500+

This is the first step of any project, to determine the exact scope and costs of yoru project. We can do basic or advanced consulting, depending on how important you think your website is for your business model, i.e. will optimizing the website for conversions increase your sales and reduce your overhead enough to make that investment worthwhile. If your business model is highly dependent on a website platform, then this is the most important step and weeks should be spent getting the platform perfect. In most cases a basic consultation is sufficient.

  • Determine Audience(s).
  • Determine Conversion Goals for each audience.
  • Determine who will do Content Strategy, SEO and Content Writing.
  • Determine if you want extra, fun elements that bring a "wow" factor to your website.
  • Determine Design preferences and options.
  • Outline specific Functionality requirements.
  • Develop Work Statement for specific scope and costs (either Fixed Scope Bid or Time & Materials with low/high end estimate).

Content Strategy: $500-2,500+

  • Review all pages on current site to understand what content is available.
  • Suggest additional content based on conversion goals.
  • Suggest removing content that may be no longer relevant.
  • Organize all the pages into a hierarchical Site Map.
  • Determine which Special Pages are important marketing landing or conversion pages, to flag for unique design later.
  • Create Menu Structure and optimized link names.
  • Determine the Value Proposition and Call to Action for every single page on your site.
  • Determine the Elements that should be featured on the home page.
  • Determine Elements that should be on every single page (e.g. Logo, Phone Number, Call to Action).

SEO Strategy: Setup + optional monthly (TBD)

  • Consult with an SEO Company (we can recommend one) that can help you with setup and ongoing SEO strategy.
  • An SEO expert will help you create a basic SEO strategy that will prioritize which keywords you want your site to compete for, so that the Content Writing stage can incorporate these keywords naturally into your content text and headers.
  • An SEO expert will help you determine if SEO is an important part of your marketing strategy and worth the costs of ongoing SEO services. Ongoing SEO is a long term expense that may or may not be worthwhile for your market, but basic SEO setup for competitive analysis and keyword selection is recommended for everyone.

Content Writing: TBD

  • Rewrite your own content or work with a third party writer (we can recommend one) to help you shape your message and edit/optimize your content.
  • Rewrite the content for every page in your Site Map.
  • Include relevant keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your content.
  • Write carefully worded Value Proposition and Call to Action to be included on every page.

Site Design Options: $500 - 10,000

  • Free: choose any of our gorgeous free designs (all mobile friendly): https://www.gutensite.com/Design
  • Hybrid ($500-1000): pick a free design and request minor changes to font, color, layout, etc: https://www.gutensite.com/Pricing-For-Design This is usually
  • Custom ($10,000+): engage our design in a fully custom design process, consultation, planning, mockups, revisions, etc. We have design partners that can offer lower prices. The market has validated that our quality is unsurpassed, but if you refer to the 80/20 rule mentioned above, lower cost options may be good enough for your purposes. However, our free templates are so good that we only recommend a custom design if you need a really cutting edge unique brand. It's not necessary for most people.
  • Third Party Design Install ($1000+): If you already have a design that some other designer did, we can install it on your site for you. We want to make sure that this design is beautiful and the best option for you, so we'll give you our feedback too. The cost of installing a third party design may vary depending on how well it's designed, and if they have specified all the dynamic elements should look, e.g. secondary pages, headers, links, etc.

Special Functionality: TBD

  • The costs will depending on the functionality requirements discovered in the Site Planning Consultation. Our platform is so robust, with so many years of features being added, it's rare that anyone needs any custom functionality. But in those cases, usually costs range from $500-2000 for most features.

Site & Content Setup: $0-$1,000+

  • Create your website on our Gutensite platform (hosting and support included).
  • Activate the free or custom design that you selected.
  • Add the content: Do it Yourself or have Gutensite do a Professional Content Setup for you.
  • Make sure every page looks beautiful, give extra attention to special pages that are important landing or conversion pages (this will be determined in the consultation and costs can be estimated at that time).

Do It Yourself (free)

We can show your team how to add content and use the Content Management System (CMS). It will give you a good opportunity to learn the system so you can manage your content long term. Your tam can ask us any questions along the way (call or email).

Professional Content Setup

Our team can setup your website for your. You will give us the content and assets (images, videos, etc), and we'll create the pages for you, setup the menu, and make sure every page looks beautiful. The standard cost for this is $25/page or $500 for special important pages (on average), so generally most setups cost around $1000+.

MONTHLY COSTS

View our Pricing Comparison Chart (and click on "Compare Packages" to see full details).

We recommend the Pro package, which has a lot of pro features, including accounts (useful for listing alerts, lead capture, etc), hosting, and great proactive email and phone support from our team. This also includes the Dedicated Webmaster Assistant which lets you just email or call and we'll make changes for you.

NEXT STEPS

  1. Create your new free trial account.
  2. Begin Project the Easy Way. If you want Gutensite to perform the majority of the strategy and work, we should start with the Site Planning Consultation which will allow us to detail the specific scope of all the work in a Work Statement with a firm price that you can get approved. Then we will take it from there, and just seek key decisions from you.
  3. Do It Yourself. If you think you want to do your own site planning and strategy, we highly recommend you go through our questionnaire (sign up and on the main page in the Control Panel click the Checklist & Design Questionnaire link). This checklist will guide you through thinking about the most important parts of planning a website. This will require a lot of time and careful strategy, but it's worth the effort.