How Long Does It Take To Build A Website?

What It Takes to Make a Website: Understanding the Website Design Process

Although there’s no “one-size-fits-all” answer, you can estimate your website design will take around 3-4 months to complete, based on how prepared you are to move through these stages below. As you’ll see, that means your timeline largely depends on communication with your designer or the agency you’ve hired.

6 Steps in The Website Design and Development Process

Each of these steps entails a unique process for building a website that is equal parts strategic, creative, and technical.

1. Discovery
2. Content
3. Design
4. Optimization
5. Testing
6. Launch

Getting to Know You

The Discovery stage includes the initial sales process, as well as early research. It ends with the formal kickoff meeting to begin the project.

What is involved in the Discovery Stage of a website design?

• Understanding your company and your goals
• Researching your competition
• Identifying your key products or services
• Documenting your goals and determining methods for measuring and analyzing results

How you can help?

If your existing website doesn’t yet have Google Analytics installed, do it now. While you’re at it, start establishing realistic goals for your website, based on existing data. For goals related to leads or sales, be sure you have a tracking process in place.

Why Content is King and Why it Takes so Long

When you build a new website or redesign an existing one, much of the content (headlines, copy, images, etc.) can be brought over from your old site. Keep in mind though, that content should be professionally written for sales generation and optimized for search engines (SEO).

Investing in a professional copywriter is a wonderful return on investment, given that your website should have strong calls to action and be geared toward generating excitement, engagement, and curiosity about your services or products. Using key storytelling techniques, a copywriter can help tell your story in a way that resonates with your audience enough to take action with you over the competition.

Did you know that over 90% of websites out there don’t receive almost any traffic? That’s truly outrageous! This is because most websites are not optimized for the information (or keywords) that most individuals are looking for. In this day and age when mostly all businesses have an online presence and most individuals interact with information online, having search engine optimized contented as a business is of primary importance that could drive many qualified leads to your business organically. Just imagine how the content you create today will enable you to attract leads to your website for years to come.

At Idea Marketing Group, we help small businesses get found by the right people looking for what you have to offer. By applying principles of lead generation, we can help you get organic traffic without ads or heavy social media presence.

What goes into the Content Stage of a website design?

• Interviewing your internal stakeholders (and, ideally, customers)
• Creating descriptive and search engine optimized headlines, title tags, and meta descriptions
• Developing a content strategy that balances your company’s goals with your target audience’s needs
• Writing easy-to-read, engaging copy with powerful calls to action
• Feedback and revisions

How can you help?

The Content Stage is typically where website design projects slow down or stall completely. If your old, outdated content is one of the reasons for the new design, or you don’t have the time and resources internally, you may want to outsource that work to your agency.

Intentionally Serving a Purpose

The way a website looks is referred to as the user interface. So, your website’s purpose (what you need it to do for you and for users) should be established in the Design Stage. This user intent begins with a primary focus and includes elements that drive attention towards a specific call-to-action.

Design is equal parts art, science, and emotion. But also, as Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Beyond communicating how potential customers see and feel about your brand, designers set the tone for how users experience your company online.

Overall, design is one dimension of branding that is one of the most powerful and memorable indicators of your business identity.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
– Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc.

Blending User Experience and Search Engine Rankings

Websites can be beautifully designed and aesthetically pleasing, but they’re also like houses. Until you have an inspector look behind the walls and test the foundation, you can’t be sure of their quality.

“Junk code” and unnecessary plugins or widgets leftover from template-based design themes can actually make your website perform more slowly and negatively impact your search engine rankings. It also impacts the website’s code to text ratio which is part of a search engine’s ranking formula (algorithm).

How do we know how fast our website is loading?

Google PageSpeed can identify your website’s overall load time speed as well as opportunities to improve speeds, which impacts user experience and search rankings. Some issues are related to the hosting server itself and cannot be corrected with the site’s code.

 

So many devices, so many browsers… Test on everything.

As the internet has grown, so have all the ways to connect to it. This has become more of a challenge for web designers because every device and browser has its own way of reading and displaying code. For example, an image shown on a new iPhone is actually 2x bigger than what you see on the screen because of the technology being used. The high-resolution retina display requires it.

Ideally, your website needs to look good on 12+ different screen sizes–each with various heights and widths. By comparison, in print design, you have a fixed size to create for. The style-sheets that control a website’s appearance are broken into sections in order to target specific elements on the website. So, they have to behave differently at different sizes.

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.
– John Ruskin

Time to celebrate!

When the time finally arrives and the demo site has been approved, it’s time to move it out of the staging area and into the live environment. That means moving the entire website from one server to another. The process includes packaging up every aspect and prepping the new server with the necessary settings.

Once your website has been moved over, the next step is to point the domain (website address) to the server. This process involves a propagation period, and it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on how your domain records are configured. That time period is out of the control of your web developer and relies solely on the domain registrar’s system.

If all domain records are configured at the domain level through a registrar like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, it usually requires a simple “A Record” change, which is controlled with an IP address. Once that one record is changed, the website can be visible in a few hours. However, if the domain records are controlled at another location like the hosting provider, it requires a full DNS change when switching from one host to another. This is done with multiple zone records that can take a day or two for the website to fully propagate.

These necessary steps and testing is is why it’s best to not start the celebration on the same day as the launch is being targeted.

Once the website has propagated, the SSL certificate can be installed. This is a very important step, because Google prioritizes websites that are secured. What the certificate does is simply enable your website to be configured to the “https://” website address. The “s” indicates it is set to use a secured connection rather than the non-secured version, which is “http://”. Even then, the website is not actually secure until all of the links, images, and other assets are also using the “https://” protocol. Therefore, developers then need to go back into the database and replace all of the links.

Even though launching a website may seem like a simple flip of a switch, there are several steps needed to complete the process. Then, after the website has been up and running for a day or two, and all of the forms have been tested and the pages have been checked, it’s safe to announce the launch.

How long does it take to build a custom website on WordPress?

Our advice is to plan to spend a minimum of 4 months building a custom 15-20 page website. As you envision your dynamic new website, you may want to rush toward the finish line. But, it’s important to consider the big picture.

Your new website is a major investment of time and money. It’s also the foundation for your business when customers, partners, or potential employees look for you online.

Essentially, both the web design agency workflow and your mutual communication efforts will determine how long it will take to make your new website. Since there are many stages to the process that require independent and mutual cooperation between content, design, and web development teams, quality assurance will demand that the process flows organically and that it’s not rushed.

After all, building a strong foundation behind a website is paramount, ensuring that no major costly issues arise over time. And even after the website is live and running, ensuring that new updates to it are successfully implemented and the website is not encountering any technical issues is essential to your website performance.

Therefore, as you begin this months-long process, tune out those ads that make it sound like your dream website is just a few clicks away. At the same time, remember that communication between your website designer and your own team will be the biggest determining factor in how long the process will take. And that, you can control.

And if you need a few more tips on how to build and promote your new optimized website, check out these very helpful resources that can help you navigate the process with ease and effectiveness:

 

Building a Standout Website

Promoting Your Website Before, During, & After Launch

Improving Your Website Design

An Integrated Marketing Strategy Starts With Your Website

Why Cheap Websites WIll Cost You More in the Long Run

 

Our top Chicago web designers have vast experience designing websites for a variety of businesses and non-profits, including manufacturing, beverage, consulting, and public institution clients. We particularly specialize in e-commerce, feature-rich and online catalog website design, and offer a free consultation. Get in touch!