<aside> What’s this about? Your organization’s online presence can play a significant role in its success and impact. A website increases your organization’s credibility, showcases its brand, generates leads, increases your chance of organic traffic, saves you time spent on customer service, and gives you a place to share updates and announcements.
What do I need to do? Find a suitable design agency and/or web developer. Collaborate to develop the visual concept, and, once the staging site is launched, “red team” it for errors.
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Further reading
Databases
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We recommend engaging a design agency to help you with the following:
A design agency will work with you to understand your needs and expectations, before sharing mock-ups.
Costs for a visual identity will typically fall in the $5K–$15K bracket. That said, you can reduce the expected costs by thinking carefully about the elements above in advance — especially if you have an eye for design already. If that sounds like you, consider taking the first steps in the process by:
But don’t forget: design isn’t art or illustration. Design is about identifying constraints to achieve a specific goal, and not about making something look pretty.
A developer can then help you implement your design in a functional website.
Developing a site is an entirely separate task from designing it. However, many design agencies partner with developers (or have in-house developers) to make the process as straightforward as possible for the customer.
You can review Recommended service providers for some agencies to consider. And-Now is one that has worked with organizations we are familiar with, and can also provide development assistance to build the site. The combined cost of design and development from And-Now will likely be in the region of $20K–$40K, although this varies based on the complexity of the site and the visual identity.
Developers will build the design on a “staging site” before deploying it on your domain. Once the staging site is launched, be sure to “red team” it for errors. You can use a tool like MarkUp to annotate screenshots in-line when giving feedback to developers.
The written content on your site should naturally fall out of your brand strategy.
Focus on your value proposition and points of differentiation (although they don’t need to be explicitly identified as such) and ensure that everything you write supports your positioning.
Modern websites often include the following elements:
There are professional agencies that can help you craft your website copy — messaging firms — but that’s probably overkill at this stage. Instead, you can just check out the websites of these messaging firms to see the tactics they use. (For example, if your organization is delivering B2B services, take a look at punchy.co.)
Once you’ve written your content, you’ll want to have it proofread. You can engage professional copywriters for this, but often a few review rounds with your team, collaborators, or friends and family can identify the glaring errors. You can also reach out to [email protected] for pro bono copywriting support.
Finally, you might consider search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of your website traffic from search engines, and can involve tweaking your copy to better match the queries that people are already searching for. This likely isn’t a priority in the early stages of your website build, but can be a useful part of your marketing strategy in the future.