Our Design Process
It’s important for you to understand the timeline of what happens after you have ordered your website. Our goal is to get your website to you as quickly as possible, but we need your help. The quicker you can respond to questions and requests made to you so our designers can continue with their work. Realistically it will take around a month to complete the site, but once we’re done you will have the website that you have envisioned and matches your company’s branding.
Step 1: Tell Us More About You and Your Company
Often when we ask our clients what they want in their website we’re told “just create something that you think looks good“. Sure, that makes our lives easier, but the reality is that your website should be more than just an online tool to give information to prospective clients and a tool that allows them to make bookings. Your website should be a major part of your branding, just as much as your business name, your logo, your company colors, and even you, as the photographer. Everything should work together and help to strengthen your brand. So what we think looks good as a website should be secondary to giving you a website that fits in with your brand and the image that you wish to display to your customer base. So step 1 of the process is to provide you with a questionnaire that will at least give us a starting point from which to move forward. Knowing a little bit about what’s on your mind will help get us to the next step quickly.
Step 2: We’ll Get To Work
Now that we have a little more information on your overall vision, and know the things that you and don’t like, our designers will begin their magic and sketch out an initial design for you. That sketch will be sent to you to review online and we want you to check it carefully and provide us with the feedback that we need to make this design perfect for you. At this point no actual coding will have been carried out, so you can ask us to change any element of the design. The more feedback you give us in one go, the quicker we can get to the point of finalizing the design so we can start coding up your website for you. At first will finalize the design of your home page, and then move to some of the internal pages. Before handing the design to the coders, you will have one more chance to check everything and approve the overall design. Then we move onto Step 3.
Step 3: Website Creation
Because your website will be coded from scratch, no use of templates, this part could take a little time to complete. Allow at least 4 weeks for this work to be done. Yes, this might sound like a long time, but our goal is not just to design and create your site for you, but when we hand it to you we want it ready to be launched. What does this mean? Well, in the past when we’ve designed sites for clients, we’ve found that we’ve done all the work and handed them over to the client so they can insert all of their content and additional images/video, only to find everything comes to a standstill. The clients have been too busy running their business and simply haven’t had the time to get their creative juices flowing to write up the content. So once we have finished coding up your site, we will write the content for you and add it to the site. Having real estate photographers on our staff means we know exactly what wording will help to attract customers, and we know not just how to keep it simple so prospective clients will understand everything, but we also know how to write this so the search engines love it too.
Step 4: Let’s Launch Your Website
After the website has been coded we will look at it together so ensure it is as perfect as you want it. Since the design part has already been finalize all they will change is the content of the site. Once the content has been put in place we are ready to launch the site.
We’re not within site of the finishing line. Your site has been built, you’re happy with the content and images, now what? This is where we really stand out from the competition. We want everyone to see your website, and that includes prospective clients. So there’s a number of things we’ll do to help you get the process started…
- We’ll let the major search engines (Google & Bing) know your site exists. If they don’t know your site is there, then they won’t rank you, right?
- We carry out our proprietary SEO Boost for free. Our SEO Boost is a one-time process that is designed to help move your website up the search engine rankings in your local area, and if you have a Google My Business listing, this will also help move that up the Google Map rankings too.
- We will add Google Analytics to your website, so you are able to see for yourself how your website is performing in terms of how many people are visiting your site, what locations they are visiting from, and which pages they are viewing when they do come to your site.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Below you will find a set of commonly asked questions that we have done our best to answer fully.
If you have other questions that we haven’t addressed below, or if any of the answers that we have
given are confusing to you, please feel to reach out to us via our Contact Us page,
and we’ll get back to you shortly after receipt.
All of the sites we build use the WordPress CMS platform. WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder and at the time of writing, well over 30% of all the websites on the Internet are built with WordPress.
Usually the whole process takes around a month, but that will depend on your own response time to questions that may be asked by our team and providing us with your feedback. We take care of everything from designing and building the site, all the way through to adding the content. Of course you can provide us with your own content, but we find that most people just don’t have the time to do that, so we usually put in the base content and allow you to make your own edits in your own time.
Once full payment has been made you completely own the website. We don’t dictate where you host the website, you can choose whatever host you want. And because the site is built on the WordPress free-source platform, it means you have ownership of all the files and folders that have been used to build your site, so you are free to move it to another host any time you wish.
Yes, absolutely you can! You will need to have a domain (along with a hosting company) before we launch your site, so it can be one that you already own, or you can purchase a new one.
No, we’ll take care of that for you! Unlike other templates or website builders you may find on the web, we don’t provide you with a template and then expect you to suddenly become web designers overnight to set your website up to the way you like it. Obviously once you decide you want to have a website, you really want it going live asap so that it can start attracting new clients. So with our system, you select a base design and tell our team what design changes you want and they’ll take care of it all for you…at no extra charge*
*This does not include adding new custom features.
Yes, of course! You are not limited to the pages that we build for you. Even after we launch you will be able to add new pages yourself, and we will provide video tutorials showing you how to do this. We would suggest you let us know all of the pages that you’re going to want initially so we can build those for you though.
Once you have paid for the website we don’t impose any additional charges, so you are free to manage your website yourself, or you can hire us or any competent web designer to manage the site for you. It’s your choice really. We provide free training on the most basic things you will need to do to manage the site e.g. backing up your website, updating plugins and themes, etc., and we’ll show you how to use the page builder to edit your content and add new pages. You don’t need to have web design skills to manage your site once it’s up, but some people simply want to focus on what they’re best at – real estate photography – and let others with more experience manage their sites. We don’t want to handcuff you, so we leave the choice up to you.
If you mean will your website automatically rank in the search engines once it is launched, the honest answer is…”it depends”! Search engine ranking doesn’t only depend on what you do with your website, but it also depends on what the competition is doing to rank their own sites. If there is a lot of competition, as there is likely to be in really large cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc., then your chances of ranking outside of the box diminish quite a bit. If you are in a small town or city where you only have a handful of real estate photographer competitors, then your chances of ranking will increase. We include our own proprietary SEO Boost at no extra charge when we launch your website. This is designed to give your rankings for both your website and your Google My Business listing, if you have one, a nice little kickstart, and you should start to see some rankings showing up in Google within the week. Of course we can’t guarantee it, but at the time of writing, we haven’t built a website that hasn’t achieved this target.