The Storyboard

Usually, the first step is that we meet and talk about what you have in mind. This is a free consultation. You may have a strong idea of what you want or you may be totally frustrated by the dozens of ways to create a website and want someone to read your mind and get it done!. By talking about likes and dislikes and favorite colors and other design elements, our designer can get a fairly good picture of what you'd like. We have a worksheet where we collect these ideas.

Today's websites are often content management websites. If the client wants to change their own content or have multiple people be contributors, then one good choice is a Drupal website. LaMich Productions can build you a Drupal site or a site with more traditional elements. No matter which way it is built, we build in Search Engine Optimization in the background as we build your site.

Next comes the outline. With the client, we determine what pages fit best with their business and help them create an outline. We then head back to the office to develop suggested design ideas and the client begins to think about text and their business message.

The Proposal

The next step in the process is our proposal and quote. We have thousands of template designs to choose from to begin, or we can start from scratch. Based on the initial meeting, we'll suggest several design ideas and then discuss how to modify them.

Once that is accepted and a down payment is received, we'll set up a development area on our server and start building! About the middle of the process, a second payment is received and the balance is due prior to final attachment of the site to the domain name. The site belongs to the client upon final payment .

Building

We'll walk you through the process of obtaining a domain name and hosting service. We always recommend www.readyhosting.com for the hosting service, but, if the client already has a relationship with another vendor, we'll work with them.

As we build the initial pages, we interact with you often, via the Internet, email and phone. It's critical that you love the site and we make sure that happens. As the initial pages, and any interactive ingredients, take shape, it becomes more clear how deep the website should be, how many pages it should have. It grows into a well-formed, standard-based, user-intuitive website.

Keeping a website clear of 'garbage' code and conforming to good web standards is important now and will continue to become more important. As the Internet and the Web matures, it will need to adhere to more and more standards. Certain things, such as the use of 'alt' tags behind images, videos and text is not only important to search engines but it is very important for Section 508 which is about disability compliance. Did you know that visually handicapped people now 'listen' to websites that are Section 508 compliant?

Refining and Optimizing

The website is ready. You've approved it and it's ready to launch. Great! We include in the proposal several refining sessions...changing text, minor revisions.

The last step for us is making sure everything is optimized. We have a checklist of items to naturally optimize your site to get it ranked as quickly as possible. This means that all the behind the scenes code is correct and complete, that it has been submitted to Google and other search engines, etc. We'll show you how to access your web statistics and what they mean. We'll also suggest local portals where the site should be registered and other tips and tricks that you can do yourself or we can do for you.

Ongoing Maintenance, Development or Teaching you how to Maintain the Site

We have an hourly charge for services. That could be for teaching you how to maintain the site yourself (consulting), or making your requested changes.