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Creating a New Website: A 4-Step Overview

If you’re thinking about building a new website for your organisation (or giving your existing website a makeover) it can be daunting not knowing what to expect or where to start.  

It’s true that creating a website can be a huge undertaking. There are lots of elements to consider, such as how you want your website to look, what you want it to say, and how you want your audiences to use it.  

While every organisation and website project is unique, here we’ve broken down the journey into key steps to give you a sense of what to expect and when.  

1. Discovery & Insight

Whether you’re a Local Enterprise Partnership, Multi Academy Trust, school, awarding body, or any other kind of organisation, your website project should start with an in-depth kick-off meeting to help the agency you’re working with to understand how you envision your website will look and work, as well as what it will achieve.  

Our kick-off meetings cover topics such as:  

  • Why you’re choosing to create a new/refreshed website. 
  • Your target audience(s). 
  • The type/amount of content required. 
  • Your brand guidelines. 
  • Any additional functionality needed. 
  • Your current hosting and domain setup. 

We regularly partner with local digital agency, Identify Digital on our website projects. It’s important that our creative team and the developers at Identify have a full understanding of the project from the get-go.

After the kick-off call, you can expect the agency to go away and carry out their own research, putting together a proposal for how your website will be structured. 

Once this is signed off, the creative work begins! 

Being crystal clear on the objective of the site in terms of what it needs to achieve for the target audience is absolutely key. This includes the look and feel, the functionality and all contact points. Really nailing these down in the discovery phase removes so many potential headaches down the line for everyone involved!

Jordan Beaumont, Identify Digital

2. Creative

The next stage of building your new website is the ‘creative’. This stage includes: 

Web Design 

A design team will mock up your website, creating designs for all key pages (e.g. homepage) and templates for any additional pages you may want to add further down the line.  

They will take into consideration your branding as well as accessibility, load speed and user experience. 

See an example: Leadership Skills Foundation 

Copy & Content 

Depending on the scope of your website project, you might have a team of copywriters creating new content for your site. They will apply your brand’s tone of voice to create copy that engages and informs your target audiences, creating consistency across your site. 

 

Photography & Videography 

At this stage, you may also want to capture and/or edit a new bank of film and photography to complement the content on your site. We recommend including a video banner on your homepage as well as other key pages, as this keeps users engaged and on your site for longer.  

See an example: Inspiring Primaries Academy Trust 

Accessibility & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 

During the creative development of your website, the team you’re working with can take into consideration accessibility and SEO. 

Ensuring a site is accessible means making conscious decisions to allow as many people as possible to access your content. This could cover considerations such as using a high-contrast colour palette, adding ‘alt text’ to images and graphics for those with screen readers, and including an audio description option on film content for those with visual impairments. 

Creating a website that is search engine optimised means making the site as easy as possible for search engines such as Google to read and understand, boosting its likelihood of appearing near the top of a user’s search. This can require a fair bit of additional work and the results are not instant, but it can be worth it for your long-term digital strategy.  

The Creative stage of the process is when the look and feel of your site will be set, guiding the rest of the project. So, invest time finding an agency you can trust to deliver outstanding creative work in line with your overall strategy and aims. 

3. Development & Testing 

Next, the project moves onto the build stage. This is the stage where developers take over the bulk of the work, turning designs into a functioning website based on the details discussed in the ‘Discovery & Insight’ phase.  

It’s important that you are completely with your creative before this point, as it’s a lot harder to change once the wheels of development are in motion. 

Development & Testing is likely to take the most time of all the four steps to creating a website. This stage covers: 

  • Build of the site itself 
  • Populating content including media assets 
  • Internal testing and user testing  
  • Responsiveness testing to make sure the site works across laptops, tablets, mobiles, etc 

When our Digital Marketing Team carries out quality assurance on new and existing websites, they also carry out compliance checks which can cover Ofsted and/or government requirements depending on the nature of your site. 

 4. Launch & Support 

Once the final website is ready and all the necessary checks have been carried out, you’re ready to launch your website!  

To make this part of the process as smooth as possible, it’s important to find out how and where your current website is hosted and let the current hosts know when your new site is going live. Some organisations can find this part tricky if they haven’t done it before, so our Digital Team can give guidance on what to do and when. 

Contrary to what you may think, the launch of your website is not the end of the project! It’s important to make sure that the agency you work with offers ongoing support including: 

  • Training and tutorials on how to get the most out of your new site. 
  • Monthly updates of your CMS and plug-ins. 
  • Emergency support. 

That way, you can be confident that your new website will continue to provide the information your audiences need no matter what.  

Ready to Get Started? 

If you’re ready to talk about creating your new website, we would love to chat. Working with Engaging Education on your website project means that you get: 

  • A team that’s invested in getting to know you and understanding what you want out of the project. 
  • A dedicated Projects & Partnership Manager who will help you through the process. 
  • A team of creative specialists including Designers, Copywriters, Photographers and Videographers dedicated to delivering a stunning end result. 
  • A committed Digital Marketing Team to provide expert technical guidance. 
  • Bespoke training and ongoing support with your site.  

Get in touch to find out more! 

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