A Smarter Premium website is the perfect option when you want to start with a design that can be customised to suit your branding and your brand personality, or when it’s time upgrade to a website that does this.
We follow a proven formula that facilitates in-depth briefing and research, wireframing, design concepts and the website build. All done in-house by our creative team who constantly looks for new ideas to help you showcase your expertise and reach new customers.
Discovery, Strategy, & Wireframe Session
A website converts better when it works for your specific business and its potential customers. It needs to offer a unique and enjoyable user experience for your unique business.
That’s why we start with a 1-to-1 Smarter Premium session with you where we make research a top priority before doing anything else. We combine a high-quality custom-branded website with a strong strategy session that helps your business become the go-to option in your niche or industry.
That is, we don’t just make it look pretty, we plan how to design it in the way people expect to use it.
We get a deeper understanding of your business and your customers, including what you do, what you offer, the problems you solve, the people you want to attract, how they choose a provider, why they should choose you and why now.
We identify your website goals and how they’re linked to your business goal and ensure the website we design plays its role in your business and exceeds your expectations.
Then we map out the wireframe to suit the information architecture and navigational structure. For the look and feel, we draw inspiration from your branding, including your logo, images and colour palette.
Page Creation
Although a Smarter Premium website has no set limit on how many pages (within reason), so that is up to you. We set up your pages and you provide the copy and any other content (e.g. text and images), unless you’re engaging us to handle your copywriting and content.
Standard page creation starts with importing and/or copy-pasting what you’ve already written and proofed before sending to us.
We format each page correctly for reading and for SEO, taking care to wrap the text around the images and on-page elements, such as call-to-action buttons, to load up quickly and display neatly across all devices.
If you opt for our Custom Page Styling option, the Page Creation process will be different.
Homepage Sections
Your Homepage is broken into different sections like this one you’re reading right here. A section might have a header, a big hero image for attention, and a row of text and some doorway buttons. Or it could be totally different.
You’d add snippets to summarise your internal pages, showing visitors right away that they’re in the right place. Google tells us this helps people stay longer on the website to vet and then contact you. The longer they’re there, the more brownie points from Google.
This Homepage structure takes visitors on a journey that encourages hot leads to choose you.
While a Smarter Premium website comes with unlimited sections, we put just enough to get the results you want.
Typography
Fonts are a very important part of website design. Not just how they look on your website, but whether they’re legible and aesthetically appealing to the visitor.
We only use fonts that are safe for the web, and they load quickly and display correctly across all browsers and devices.
When designing a Start-Up website, we use default built-in fonts unless scoped otherwise. But since you’re choosing a Smarter Premium website, we faff around with different font options to identify the one that suits your brand and brand personality.
Custom Content Page Styles
Like with your Homepage, you can improve your internal pages with different sections that we call Custom Content Page Styles. They’re great elements that grab the visitor’s attention, keep them engaged and convert them.
There’s a suite of custom content pages to choose from to accommodate the website content you want to display, such as your About Us, Services, Gallery or Portfolio.
Customised Module Styling
Once you’ve chosen your custom content elements, it’s time to customise how each of them looks and functions.
That’s how we match these elements to your branding and make them do exactly what you want them to do.
There’s a variety of styling options to modify the fine details such as sizes, positioning, colours and fonts. You can also modify how the information is displayed, for example accordions for FAQs, drop-downs for locations and galleries that scroll across.
Photo Galleries
Our customisable galleries are perfect for displaying a collection of photos on your website. They’re quite popular with clients who like to display their portfolios, including Before and After comparisons.
Depending on the type of collection, you might decide you want it displayed in grid format, or you might prefer to let visitors click or scroll through it like a photo carousel. Some clients prefer to display the photos in slideshow format.
You can order the photos, animate them, modify their sizes and spacing, add captions to them…whatever you want.
Website Footer
The Footer section of your Smarter Premium website helps pull very important information together and creates a better user experience, which in turns means a high-performing website.
There, you can insert a snippet of information about your business, such as what you do, where you’re located, some links to key internal pages, links to your social pages, and a call to action (how to contact you).
The footer information benefits a Google-friendly angle for your search engine ranking as well as build your branding awareness.
Design Revisions
The revision process helps to move the design closer and closer to the final look, build and launch. The Smarter Premium website offers two (2) rounds of site revisions compared to the Start-Up websites only offering one round.
One round of revisions usually involves submitted the design draft to you for review so we can get all your feedback at one time. We ask questions as needed and make the changes before submitting a new version for review or approval.
However, not all revisions are created equal. We have two levels of revisions: major revisions (modifying the entire page layout) and minor revisions (editing a sentence here, a photo there, changing a colour and so on).
It’s therefore important that you take time to review the website drafts closely, identify as many tweaks as possible and give as much feedback as possible each round.
FAQs Pages with Accordions
Need to showcase a lot of info in a small space? That’s a job for the accordion module.
The FAQs module makes your questions and answers look tidy and makes it easier to display the answers promptly for your website visitors.
It’s customisable with optional elements such as icons, colours, typography, borders and spacing.
This module can also be optimised for search engine optimisation to make your answers appear in the search results on Google. This is especially great if you want the page to rank higher.
Call To Action
High-converting websites contain attractive and effective calls to action that encourage users to do what you want them to do, such as call, email, follow or download.
Each call to action on your Smarter Premium website can be customised to suit your brand colours and to match the shapes, fonts and other elements of the overall design.
Plugin Suite
As your Smarter Premium website runs on WordPress, there are several WordPress plugins that we must use to make the customisable design elements and modules function.
(Don’t worry about this techy side of things, our creative team will take care of it.)
Sitemap & Archives Page
For more SEO benefit, we set up a sitemap and the archive pages. Google loves links, and these two types of pages display a lot of them.
A sitemap page automatically displays the title of each page in a list to help website visitors see the structure of your website at a glance. Think of the Content Table in a book. Helpful, right? This option is crucial when you have a large website that doesn’t have a search engine to help people find what they need.
Similarly, an archive page automatically displays your content, but this time by categories. For example, you might have a blog that has 10 categories. Each category is automatically given its own archive page to help readers view articles for that specific category.
These are just two other ways we ensure a positive user experience for your visitors.
SEO for Higher Ranking
There’s no point launching a website that can’t be found on search engines. This next step, optimising your website for search engines, is super important in helping your new Smarter Premium website gain traction on Google and other search engines.
We optimise the back end of your website (the cPanel and WordPress) and optimise the pages, copy and images to help your pages show up when people search for your keywords on Google.
And when your optimised pages are shared on social media, they will be discovered there as well when people type the related keywords.
As you can see, we don’t just design it, we also optimise it for you to start getting good return on your investment.
Custom 404 Page
Sometimes a visitor discovers a link to your website but then either ends up on the wrong page or reaches a dead link.
Some default 404 pages sound like this was the visitor’s fault. Others make you sound like you don’t care to fix your own dead links.
Instead of annoying the visitor, let’s design a helpful 404 page that gives them information they can use and the best call-to-action to follow.
This is good practice because you keep them on your website, not let them go to your competition.
Plus, the fewer dead links on your website, the more brownie points Google gives you.