COMPLETE web design process [PART 1: STRATEGY]

the difference between charging $500 and $155,000 for a website is the strategy behind it there are any number of AI tools that will give you a pretty nice looking website in one click but those clients that are willing to pay 5 10 even 15,000 for you to build them a website are not really paying you for the website they're paying you to solve a problem for them and they're paying you to make them money and so your value as a web designer is in your ability to put together a high level website stretchy that is

going to do just that and this is exactly what I'm going to be sharing with you today step by step how to put together a website strategy that's going to make your clients money and in turn make you more money too we're going to be using an example project this was a real client that I worked with 3 years ago and I'm going to be redoing this project so you can actually see me carry out each stage and so by the end of this video you're going to be able to carry this out for yourself

and confidently start charging more for your own web design services so first let's take a look at what actually goes into a website strategy so there are two stages to this process the first is the content strategy and the second is the information architecture so the content strategy is basically the in what content should go on the website and aligning this with the client's overall strategy and business goals so this includes your messaging your marketing and you're creative and the second stage is the information architecture so once you have the overall content strategy this is

how you actually structure this on the website this includes your sit map and your content layout then lastly once you have all of this there's one very important final step that most people will Overlook but without this everything else in this strategy becomes useless so starting with the content strategy this is always put together in collab collaboration with your clients so I start all of my projects with a strategy call to ask questions share ideas and agree on each part of this content strategy but before you go into this call you want to make sure

that you've already done your own research you're familiar with your client goals Their audience their industry and all of their key competitors so that you always come into this first meeting prepared with your own suggestions and this will help you facilitate a really productive strategy session rather than just coming into this and asking your client to have all the answers so the first step of the prep work I will get my client to fill in this brand questionnaire and this is due one week before our call so the example client I'm going to be using

in this video is a fitness Creator they've spent the last two years building an audience of over 20,000 subscribers on YouTube and 200,000 followers on Pinterest with over 1 million monthly views the problem they're experiencing right now is that this audience is currently only bringing them in about $11,000 a month so they want to grow this and start monetizing their audience with digital products and they've come to me to build a website for them to sell their workout guides from the deliverables for this project are a digital product strategy so this is focused on their

marketing and their customer Journey from their content and then a four-page frame or websites so a homepage that doubles as an about page two long form sales Pages a social media landing page and then integrating this with gumroad to sell the digital products and so this questionnaire is going to help me get more details about their business goals Their audience their competitors the preferences for their visual brand their marketing plans and all the technical details for their website so a lot of these are things that I've already discuss with the client in the initial sales

call but clients can often forget to mention things when they're put on the spot so you really want to encourage them to take their time and give as much detail as possible here always make sure to remind your clients at the beginning of a project that this is a collaborative process and the more details they can give you especially at the beginning here the better results you can get there so these are the answers that my client shared with me in their questionnaire and what I'm going to do now is take these and use these

to conduct my own research so that I can carry out a competitor analysis so the purpose of doing this is to identify opport unities that your brand has to stand out both visually and in your messaging and strategy so in terms of a visual brand to be successful within a specific industry your brand needs to be both familiar and distinctive it needs to be familiar because when a product or a brand feels familiar to your audience it helps to build trust and confidence in that brand so paying attention to Common design features and what is

the standard in your industry will help align you with other brands which will give your brand a sense of credibility and reliability but you also want to be distinct I so you want to look for opportunities within your industry to be visually memorable and different to your competitors and the same goes for your messaging you want to study the messaging of the other brands you can create your own unique value proposition that compels customers to choose you over them so I always ask for my clients key competitors in this questionnaire my client didn't give me

much to go on here when this happens don't be afraid to go back and ask them to fill in more details but for our competitor analysis this is fine because it's always best to do your own research here anyway because when you're in your business business and you know your industry from the inside out sometimes you aren't even aware of who your audience are actually comparing you to you can presume that they're comparing you to other small channels or small businesses like yours but in reality your audience are more likely comparing you to the industry

leaders so if I want to help position my clients alongside the top dogs in their industry these are the people that I need to be studying and so what I'm going to do is identify the top competitors by looking at the top creators in their industry and then picking two of these that seem the closest to what this Creator is trying to do with their own channel so we can identify opportunities that they have to stand out and then once I've done this I'm then looking at their entire online presence their content their social media

and their website to identify what their unique value proposition is what are their strengths what do they do really well that we can draw inspiration from and what are their weaknesses what don't they do so well that we could be better at and this is going to help me identify opportunities that my client's brand has to stand out for example let's look at competitor one this is a very large creator with over 5 million subscribers they have very high quality production and brand photography that is consistent across all of their platforms in terms of their

products they have three free workout plans and then they have an app that people can subscribe to the weaknesses that I found include no clear call to action they have less personal connection they don't do much talking in their YouTube videos and there's no opportunity to access them directly to ask questions and participate in a community because they're such a large Creator from this I've identified some opportunities that my client has to stand out so we want to use a personal story to build a stronger connection with their audience then we want to focus on

their customer journey and having really clear C to actions linked directly from their YouTube videos and then in terms of their products the benefit of being a smaller Creator is that they're able to offer exclusive Community Access to ask questions directly and so for the second creator that I found this was a slightly smaller Creator this Creator's strengths are that they have a stronger personal connection they mix Vlog style content with workout videos they also have a signature workout style that sets them apart from other creators and they have a very simple product Suite that

is very easy to understand in terms of their weaknesses they really lack visual consistency across their platforms they have dark gym photographs that are very generic to Fitness Brands so we want to set ourselves apart from this aesthetic and they have a really confusing customer Journey so their social media Links Page has too many options and their website has no clear call to action and so from this I've identified more opportunities for my client first up they are a lot more accessible for beginners and appeal to an older female audience due to the personal connection

with this audience similar to this Creator we want to keep the product sweet very simple and easy to understand with a focus on a signature workout style and we want to make sure we utilize bold color choices to enhance visual consistency across all the platforms and so this is great because we've started to think about how we're going to position this brand and play to their strengths to set them apart from other creators and we're going to keep this in mind as we go into putting together our content strategy starting with the messaging the base

of every High converting Landing page is in the messaging getting this right is the most important thing and then making it visually attractive it's just like the icing on the cake some of the most successful landing pages are honestly some of the ugliest pages I have ever seen they'll literally just be a page of text with no pictures and an ugly font and they'll still be getting a good conversion rate because they have the right messaging connecting with the Right audience now obviously we're going to be doing a bit better than that but the point

is that you want to spend the most amount of time getting this messaging right first and then you can't go too wrong after this and so the method that I use with all my clients is putting together this brand story script and this is from a book building a story brand I went through this in a lot more detail in this video here and so if you're not familiar with this then make sure to go back and watch this to get a more in-depth look at what this brand story script is and how to put

it together but basically this is going to give your client a list of key messaging points that they can use throughout their marketing and their website to help them craft a compelling story that is going to get their audience ready to buy from them so to start building this script first we need a really good idea of who the audience are and what problems we're solving for them and so I can get the answers to these questions from this initial questionnaire but you can also do some of your own research here one thing that I'm

going to do is go to my client's YouTube channel and take a look at the questions that people are asking in their comments because this is going to tell me a lot about who Their audience are and what they're looking for and then when I have my notes I'm going to start putting together this brand story script here now to start off this process I have some chat GPT prompts to get the ideas flowing and the first step is identifying the key problem that you're solving for your audience so basic basically what is the thing

that they need when they come to you and there's three levels to this so there's the external problem which is their surface level need this is basically what your customer is typing into Google or in this case YouTube when they're looking for a service or a product like yours so for example effective homeworkouts for women over 40 then second you have your internal problem so this is what feelings are they having in relation to this surface level need for example they might be feeling frustrated and disheartened because despite their best efforts to say fit they're

struggling to see any real progress towards their goals or they might be feeling a lack of self- trust because they struggle to stay consistent and build good habits and then lastly you have your philosophical problem so why is it wrong that your customers would experience this problem this often begins with you deserve or you shouldn't have to so for example everyone deserves to feel empowered and confident in their own skin regardless of age Fitness level or current situation this philosophical problem is like your joint Mission with your customers and so I'm just getting some ideas

right now to then workshop with my client later on this really doesn't need to be perfect next up you want to identify the villain so what is stopping the customer from achieving their goals or their desired transformation and this is usually related to time money or lack of knowledge so time feeling like they don't have enough time to prioritize themsel mindset fear of failure investing time and money and then giving up or not seeing results or lack of knowledge so confusion and overwhelm at conflicting Fitness advice or lack of personal guidance and a clear plan

to follow then you want to make a list of the positive POS outcomes or the transformation that your client will experience after working with you this is about results and transformation rather than the features of your product so for example empowered energized and proud of your progress a stronger and healthier version of yourself so then now that you have a beginning so the problem that your client is currently facing and an ending which is the positive outcomes that you're going to help them get you need to give them a clear step-by-step plan to get from

A to B so this should be a really simple step-by-step process that makes it really easy for your customers to just say yes right away your process may actually have 15 smaller steps in between but the point is that your customer does not need to know every step in order to get started so you want to keep this really simple for example start with my free nutrition guide pick a program and access the community then keep at it and watch as you become the stronger healthier and more confident version of yourself then once you have

all of this we need to show our customer why we are the best person to help them get what they want so there's two ways to do this and the first is empathy we want to show that we understand our customers challenges is and so in this case it's about how do we use the personal story and past experience to show that we understand and relate to what the audience are struggling with and we know how to help them overcome this for example for this I can share my client own fitness journey and how they

manage to transform themselves and then I want to build their Authority so show that they have what it takes to help their customers overcome these same problems this is about showing results so we can add past clients testimonials case studies and portfolio examples and then the last thing that we want to do in this script here is help them avoid failure so we want to gently remind our customer what will happen if they fail to solve their problems for example they continue to follow random workout videos with no real plan and struggle to see any

progress or they might find a workout program to follow but then try to go from Z to 100 overnight and quickly give up when it doesn't stick and so this here is our brand story script and what this does is give us a bunch of key messaging points to pull from when we're putting together our website content and putting together messaging like this can take a lot of practice so my advice if you're just starting out would be to just keep it simple people buy things that they understand the quickest so focus on being clear

instead of trying to be too clever and you can always add the clever later on and so the next step now in this content strategy is to take a look at the client's marketing plan this is something that a lot of web designers Overlook they think I'm just building a website marketing really isn't my job but your client's marketing strategy how they plan on getting people to this website and where they're coming from will dictate what kind of structure you need to use for this website because your website your landing page is just one step

in your customer journey to buy from you and when they come onto here we ideally want to take them to the action that we want them to take in a few clicks as possible and so the first thing that we need to understand is your customers's level of awareness when they're coming onto your website there are four different levels of awareness you have unaware this is when customers are unaware that they even have a problem that needs solving next is problem aware this is when they're aware that they have a problem but they may not

be aware of the solutions available to them then you have solution aware customers are aware of their problem and the possible solutions but they may not know which brand to choose to help them and then product aware is when customers are aware of your brand and its Solutions and they're actively considering them as a potential solution to their problem so to demonstrate this let me show you two different website structures that you might use so first up you have a product based business selling sleep supplements they're hoping to get most of their traffic from organic

searches on Google and so their potential customer might be typing into Google something like why am I always tired now this person is either in the problem aware phase where they know they have a problem but are unaware of the solutions available to them or they may have a few ideas of the solutions available to them but they're unaware of your specific brand at this point so your goal with your website is to intercept them at the point where they are searching on Google and so your website structure is probably going to look something like

this you're going to have multiple resources and blogs with the goal of intercepting people in their search for solutions that are adjacent to the problem that you solve so when they come onto this page your goal is to help them solve the problem that they're having build trust and introduce them to your brand person coming onto your site they have no idea who you are what you do and are not even thinking of buying anything from you right now so in these blog posts you might position your own products as a possible solution to their

problem but more likely your call to action would be to offer a freebie to get them on an email list where you can continue nurturing them because this audience are going to need a lot more nurturing and Trust building to move them through these stages of awareness to get them ready to buy from you and if they're curious enough from this blog post they might start to browse the rest of your website to find out more where the FOC focus of all these other Pages would be to direct them towards your product page or your

landing page so this person here is very different to my client situation where Their audience is most likely someone who's been following them on YouTube and watching their videos for the past few weeks and when they're coming onto this website they are in the product aware phase they already know and trust this Creator and they're actively considering buying one of their workout programs so the focus of this website is going to be on high converting landing page designed to keep them on this page and answer any questions they have and get them ready to hit

by so whereas here we're using this structure to optimize for SEO the best website structure to use for my client is going to be one page this is not as good for SEO but it does increase conversion rates and so you can start to see how you cannot have a high converting website without integrating it with your marketing plan you have to map out the entire customer journey and so for my client this is what their customer Journey looks like I'm also helping them put together their digital product suite and so the three products I'm

suggesting that we focus on our free nutrition guide an ab workout program and a dumbbell home workout program and the reason for this is that these align with the most popular video topics and so there will always be a product that naturally fits in with their regular High performing content and so for their marketing plan they are going to put out their regular YouTube videos and for each video they want to pick one product that naturally aligns with the video topic and then this video is going to help to build trust show Their audience how

this product can help them and start to get them curious enough to click the link in the description this will then take them directly to an individual sales page for this offer and this will really clearly show the value of this product answer any questions or doubts and will likely be an Impulse product so under 50 bucks and so hopefully it's a quick no-brainer choice for this customer to add this into their cart we'll also have a homepage which will double as an about page and this will be a place where they can present the

entire product Suite in one place and direct them to these individual sales pages and then lastly a quick Links Page to add to their Link in BIO which again will direct them straight to the individual sales pages and so this plan is very focused there is very little opportunity for a customer to get confused or lost because the goal is to direct them to these sales pages and get them ready to buy in as few clicks as possible then once they purchase the journey doesn't end there we always want to overd deliver and surprise this

customer with the amount of value that we've packed into our products and so their experience and the trust that you build by overd delivering with your free content and then again with this initial purchase will help turn this customer into a Super Fan that will want to purchase anything that you put out so whether this product was a freeb or a paid ebook they are now more likely to also purchase everything else in your product week too and so we also want to make sure that we're implementing UPS sales at the checkout so that they

can bundle these products together which are very effective and so it's really important to explain this customer journey to your clients and have them agree and be on the same page because you want them to understand how to use their website effectively I really want to emphasize to my client that for each video they're creating they want to match this to one of their products and then Focus this video on funneling this audience to that sales page because most of my client first instinct would be to always link their homepage to display all of their

offers at once to Their audience but this is the least effective way of getting people to buy you want to have a very focused customer Journey that guides your customer to one specific action in the least clicks possible and so if you help your client understand the strategy Behind these things they can start to get the most out of their website which is why it's really essential that you put a lot of effort into how you present this to your clients I mentioned in the beginning of this video that this is probably the most important

part if a client doesn't agree in the overall strategy and understand how to use their website effectively then all of this that you put together just becomes useless you'll find that they start adding endless pages and useless content that distracts users from the main goal of the website and it turns it from a sales machine into a public library and then they wonder why this website isn't making them any money and so I spent a lot of time putting together this strategy deck and this is a template that's included in the web design workflow below

if you want to use it for yourself and what I do is I put all my research and my notes from the competitor analysis the brand story script the marketing strategy and the customer journey and I write these all up before our initial strategy call and then your client is going to get an opportunity to add in their own thoughts and agree on this strategy because ideally they know better than anyone who Their audience are and what they want they've been in the trenches building their business talking to these people and doing this market research

for themselves and so putting together this strategy should be a collaboration you need their input so you want to come with an open mind ready to listen for their feedback but you do want to make sure that you're bringing as many of your own ideas as possible because otherwise this can be a very painful experience clients often need examples and they need to see where you're going with this so that they can give helpful input into this strategy and then afterwards when I have my notes from our call I'll finalize this document and send it

over to them and then the last thing within this strategy deck that we haven't gone over yet are the site map and the creative Direction once I have my customer Journey mapped out I know what pages I need this is when we move into the information architecture so where we map out all the actual content sections for each of these Pages the best way to do this is by putting together a sitemap so you can get a feel for the overall flow of the customer Journey throughout each page page and then when we present this

to the client it's easy for them to see if any content is missing and so to make this really easy there are a number of high converting sections that I will use for every website and I already have them here in this template all listed out ready to go so all I need to do is just rearrange the ones that I need for each of these pages so starting with the homepage it's really important to remember that not everybody is going to start on the homepage so you really don't need to have everything on here

clients will often want all the information on their homepage but this is just an introduction and you don't introduce yourself to someone by telling your whole life story you want to keep it simple and Clarity is key so this is the typical structure that I would use for a homepage starting with a hero section this should immediately tell me what you do who it's for how it will make my life better and what action do you want me to take the next section is then going to build trust and Authority so either using logos of

brands that you've worked with or been featured in or add a testimonial here then we want to dive deeper into the key problem that we're solving for our audience and position our product or service as the solution and then lay out our products we under here next we want to continue to build Authority and trust with a short about section this is to build connection with your audience and then link it back to how you are uniquely qualified to help them solve their problems always adding in more testimonials for some additional social proof and then

lastly you never ever want to end on a dead page you always want to end with a call to action and so this can either be work with us or displaying a featured product or in this case I want to have our lead magnet here and so I'm going to lay out the content like this for all the pages we're going to have two sales Pages which will both use the same layer out just different content for each product and then in the template bundle below I have this cheat sheet that breaks down the best

practices for each of these sections and what they would actually include and then along the top here I'm using this to plan all the navigation links and I'm trying to keep this as minimal as possible and just think about what the user might be looking for when they come onto this site so quite often a client will think that you should be able to find every piece of information that you could imagine related to their business in this navigation bar here but we want to use this to direct your users towards the action that you

want them to take and so it is far more effective if you keep this very focused and have as few links as possible and then include a very clear call to action button and in fact for these sales Pages I'm going to remove this navigation bar Al together this is actually only going to be on the homepage because I want them to stay on this sales page and then all the other information and links can be put in the footer down here and so the final stage of this before we can jump into designing this

website here is to agree on the creative Direction regardless of what kind of designer you are whether you want to offer brand and web design or you want clients to have a full brand IDE identity when they come to you putting this together and having your clients sign off on this before you go into designing the actual website is going to save you a ton of time later on down the line you want to make sure that you and your client share the same vision from the start so that you don't get carried away with

your own ideas and then end up with a lot of revisions from your client later on down the line when you've already fleshed out and designed half the website so going back to our competitor and our market research we're looking for familiar design features that you can use to build trust and credibility but we're also looking for ways to visually set this brand apart and become distinctive and memorable so you want to make sure that you're grabbing inspiration from a wide range of sources make sure to stay off Pinterest some much better sites for inspiration

are behance sight Inspire Awards dribble or design inspiration what I'm doing is I'm grabbing fonts colors and photography styles to put into this mood Bo here to give me an overall look and feel for the design style as a web designer you're going to have to get really good at sourcing brand photography because this is almost always something that clients need help with my favorites for this include free sites like pixels or and splash and then my favorite paid sites are death to stock or stocky and honestly it's really worth investing in paid stock images

to get more unique high-end photography because the right images can really make or break your designs I also like to take some screenshots from other websites and pick out design features that I'm going to be drawing inspiration from and then I'm going to create some small mockups of different web design features to give my client an idea of how I'm going to apply this to their website and so once I finalized this strategy deck the client is happy and they've approved everything in here it's time to get started actually putting together all of this content

as any experienced web designer knows this is often the most painful part of the project so hit the follow and join me in the next video where I'll be taking you through exactly how I'm going to get all this content ready to start designing