Brandan got you going with part 1 of this tutorial — the technical foundation for your site.

If you didn’t go through our short list of discovery questions earlier, now is a great time. With your answers in hand, we can tackle the creative process.

Gather content

Start with what you do know

Chances are you’ve already got something that talks about your business — a print ad, a business plan, etc. Get together materials like that, plus any photos, videos, and your company logo. Need a logo? We do that too — just ask.

Imagine your website is a brochure

Like a good brochure, your site does two important things:

• Talks to a targeted audience — who is your audience?
• Communicates useful, actionable facts — what do you want to say?

But, unlike a brochure, a website is all about user experience. So the most important question to answer is what do your visitors want/expect?

Find examples

Let’s be clear — it is not okay to cut and paste someone else’s work. But it can be extremely helpful to look around other websites and see:

• What you like
• What your competitors are doing
• What your industry is doing
• What your customers might expect to find on your site

Show us websites that have information and/or features that you like. We’ll never plagiarize, but we will take your input into consideration.

Ask for help

If you want to tackle writing your own content, I’ve put together some pointers. However, if you feel out of your depth, Lime Tiger is happy to turn your raw materials into engaging, informative content. Talk to us about content creation anytime.

Create a wireframe

Starting to build

With all of your content in hand — and not before — we can concentrate on the structure of your site. Just as if we were building a home, we want to make sure you have a sturdy structure that:

• Supports your content
• Is arranged sensibly
• Can be added to

Your wireframe is basically a flow chart showing how each part of your website is connected. It will probably take several iterations of a wireframe in order to get the structure’s flow just right.

The page bone’s connected to the navigation bone

Everyone expects an arm to connect to a wrist, and a wrist to a hand, and so on. It’s the same with your site structure. Even before they’ve seen your site, visitors expect certain things to be in certain places. We can help you know what a typical user expects, like clicking your logo to get to the home page.

(Yeah, I used to be a loner and a rebel too, Dottie…

But unless your business is ABOUT breaking the rules, the Internet is not the place to try it. A confused visitor will just leave.)

Occasionally, we need to revise our estimate at this point. Five pages of content can easily become six or seven in order to make sense and be easy to use. If this situation comes up, we’ll discuss your options.

Don’t look back

Now you’re ready to get a visual look. Small things may still need to change throughout the rest of the process, but at this point all of the content is present and accounted for in the wireframe. If you add new content or change the flow of information after this point, you’re changing the scope of the project — and that means more work, time, and money.

Design page layouts

From here, we’ll use your existing visual identity to create pages that organize and present your content while maintaining your “look.” Usually, we mock up an illustration of your home page, often with placeholder copy (lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, etc.), to give you an idea of how text, photos, and graphics look on the page.

After a round or two of tweaking the home page mock-up, we’ll get your green light to start building all the pages. If there are very complex or technical pages, we’ll ask you to approve those mocked-up layouts as well before actually building them.

Yep, after all this, there still isn’t a website. Brandan and I will now work together to build a test site where you can see everything in action. Once all the pages are online, approved by you, and tested in multiple web browsers, we’ll unveil your site to the world.

More about this final part of the journey in part 3!