Web Design
Building websites with purpose.
In a world where almost all B2B buyers start their journey online, what are the chances that a potential customer discovers your company and does business with you without visiting your website at some point in their buying journey?
When a potential customer visits your website for the first time, your business credibility is on the line. Your sale is on the line. The difference between doing a great job and an average job on that website may represent tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of lost opportunities a year.
Increasingly your customers expect to be able to self-help from your website too. If helping your customers via your website is part of your requirements then you may need call-logging/help desk systems to integrate with the website, live chat facilities and knowledge base functionality (with downloadable assets such as white papers, videos, podcasts and more).
There's little doubt that your website is a critical component in winning new business and servicing existing customers.
Your Pre-Project Checklist
Before commissioning a new website you need to be very clear about its success criteria. Intergage developed a "Website Goals & Objectives" checklist for just this purpose.
Every website design and build project should be prefixed by the first half of your marketing journey.
- You should be able to communicate your business strategy
- Your mission, vision and values should be highly polished
- You should be crystal clear on who we are designing the website for (your marketing personas should be well developed)
- Your value proposition should be easily communicated
- Your uniqueness (or at least why you are very different) should be easy for all to understand
- Your brand guidelines (and tone of voice documentation) should be immediately to hand
- You should have a realistic budget - at Intergage it's unlikely we can help any business with less than £6k to invest
- Your business plan and marketing plan would complete the information we could use to provide you with the best possible solution.
Three Phases of a Website Project
Website designers have to cater for users on all kinds of devices and your website needs to work just as well on mobile devices as it does on a desktop PC.
No sane builder would start a house build without a detailed architectural drawing or a clear bill of materials. So it is with business website design. A website should always be built to a plan and that plan should detail all the assets (copy and images) required.
Our experts can help with each stage.
- Planning & Design
- Build
- Continuous Improvement
1. Planning and Design
- Auditing your existing website and its performance in search engines
- Benchmarking against competition in terms of messaging and user experience (UX)
- Review of existing marketing activities – what is currently working and what isn't – in order to take the lessons learned into the new build.
- Information architecture/sitemap
- Wireframes for mobile, tablet and PC
- Designs for mobile phones tablet and PC
- Asset audit – gap analysis – what assets are required for the new build and who is responsible for sourcing or creating the assets.
The output from the planning phase is a blueprint for a complete website along with investment guidance and a set of design visuals covering the home page and key landing pages. Once signed off by the client, the blueprint forms the base of the next stage of the project – the build phase.
2. Build
From a blueprint, website builders typically build a prototype to bring the design visuals to life. This demonstrates the proof of concept – ensuring that the design elements of the site (effects such as hover-overs and menu styles) are working as the client has envisaged.
Once the prototype is signed off, the build proper starts. An empty framework is created and the content is added. Customers are provided with a preview link in order to monitor the build progress.
Prior to go-live, your team will be trained to update, manage and market your website using the content management system provided.
Meta data and hyperlinks are added to the web pages to help search engines understand the structure of the website before a final review of the website with the client (usually face to face).
Upon sign-off, an extensive go-live checklist (refined since 2003) prevents any website going live with obvious errors.
3. Continuous Improvement
No website is ever perfect or finished. User journeys can always be tested and improved, often leading to significant improvements in results. Data-driven decisions are made to avoid the subjectivity associated with design. Key elements on landing pages – copy, forms, calls to action etc can be all be A/B tested.
Our Website Design Heritage
Intergage has a rich history of producing high quality, profitable and bespoke website design. It is our belief that no two companies are the same – originality with each and every project. We do not build template websites.
The design and build process which underpins our business is one tailored to the exact requirements of the client and their users. The knowledge and experience of our in-house Design and Project Management team is always designing for results – a relentless focus on return on investment. Moreover, the final product is always aesthetically pleasing, beautiful and engaging.
Our technology stack
