10 Steps to Design a Website with an Agency

Whether you are looking to design your first website or are redesigning an existing one, your company needs a team of people with a strategic vision. Revamping a website is a mission where success or failure depends on choosing the right partners.

An outdated website is like a salesperson who is ready to retire. While it may have been successful in the past, websites using the latest technology now outperform it in many ways. No doubt you encountered a few pitfalls since you first launched your site and you want to ensure you don’t repeat old, outdated ideas this time around. Perhaps your website has not kept pace with your company’s goals and strategies and, over time, its message is no longer as relevant. Here are the 10 key steps to designing an agency website.

1. A Redesign Strategy that Mobilizes your Team
2. Define the user experience
3. SEO
4. Content
5. Design
6. Deciding on the CMS
7. Martech Stack
8. Development
9. Technical Integration
10. Analytics

Step 1: A Redesign Strategy that Mobilizes your Team

Bruno Lalonde, Marketing Director

What motivates you to take on this project? There are many reasons to redesign a website.

• Your product line and/or the services you provide may have changed over time and your site no longer accurately reflects what you are offering.
• You recently made a business acquisition and would like to merge the acquired business website with the official company site.
• You are rebranding and need to implement the new design on all your marketing platforms.
• You are going digital. To succeed online, implementing digital platforms such as automated marketing funnels, intranets or extranets may become essential.

In planning your website’s new design, you must consider the needs of each department. Obviously, a website is a fantastic tool for sales and should, when integrated with your marketing campaigns, work to generate leads. But a well-designed website can meet several other needs as well such as managing human resources.

HR needs must be an essential part of your website strategy

Your website will be an important tool for future employees – thus your strategy must include a human resource component. In a context of full employment, companies that regularly attain their growth objectives have, for the most part, some type of automated process to collect resumés as well as web pages describing the company’s corporate culture. These companies are successful in communicating the benefits of joining their team. Candidates in today’s job market use various methods to find the suitable job. For many, applying for a job with a click on a button linked to their LinkedIn profile is now the norm. User forms should only ask for the minimum amount of information needed to prequalify the candidate, nothing more. We will discuss this point in a future article.

Here’s what you should have on hand when you start redesigning your website

1. An organized diagram of your product / service offering
2. Clear positioning
3. A well-studied digital plan
4. The personas to be addressed
5. The key messages you wish to convey to your personas
6. Your new brand image if it’s a rebranding exercise.

Before jumping in and redesigning your website, other decisions need to be made based on the budget, the business model and the context of your industry in the market. Defining a company’s digital strategy should be the starting point. The strategy must consider digital touch points and other traffic channels to provide the best possible customer experience. Develop and refine the following points to ensure that all factors which might impact the redesign have been taken into consideration.

Points to be discussed when designing a digital strategy

• Define the goals the redesign is intended to meet
• Identify the best-performing traffic sources in the current marketing strategy and determine which new traffic sources are worth investing in
• Create a comprehensive content outline and site map
• List the digital tools that are currently used (CRM, MAP, Chat, CMS etc.)
• Determine the types of content that need to be produced
• Organize a committee to take charge of the website
• Before the redesign, plan or at least get an idea of the different campaigns that are to be set into motion once the new website has been launched
• Build a project management calendar by phase

Step 2: Define the user experience

Benjamin Loiselle, Artistic Director

According to the principles of user experience (or UX Design), a successful browsing experience is one in which the user’s interactions with a digital service allow them to accomplish the required tasks easily and in a pleasant manner. In this sense, the UX Designer’s role is to use empathy to predict user behavior to reduce any friction that might be caused by bad design. The designer goes through four fundamental phases to create the best possible user experience: research, definition, prototyping and testing.

User Experience | Research Phase

The research phase is where the necessary knowledge about end users to build up enough empathy to respond to their needs is acquired. While working on a project, we need to obtain background information about the industry and become experts in the field as it is essential to see the overall picture in order to communicate effectively. We develop this expertise through a dialog with the customer, but also by being aware of what competitors are doing. We identify important issues in the industry and that, in conjunction with the creation of personas and user-stories, will help us formulate a website that meets the needs of the user.

User Experience | Definition Phase

After the Research Phase comes the Definition Phase. This is where we identify and prioritize any challenges to better overcome them. In this phase, we have enough information to create the site map that defines the hierarchy of the pages on the site and how they relate to one another. We brainstorm general ideas about how best to serve the user. What type of menu will be most effective in promoting navigation? Which elements on the page should be prioritized to optimize interactions with the user? These are the types of issues to be explored at this point.

User Experience | Prototyping Phase

Next comes the Prototyping Phase. This is where we build the website that focuses on the features without worrying about the site’s visual aspect. This is often known as making wireframes. The goal here is to not only define the global structure of various sections of the website, but also to establish how it will interact with the user, which functions are to be included and identifying where help pages may be needed. We also emphasize any information that can be used to promote the ergonomics of the digital platform.

User Experience | Test Phase

The designer creating the UX will not be using the site on a daily basis. Thus, in the test phase, we confirm whether the designer’s ideas do, indeed, work seamlessly in the real world. These tests allow us to adjust our prototypes quickly without having to resort to complex programming until the overall experience is pleasant for the user.

Throughout this process, the designer puts himself in the user’s shoes. Everything is constructed to meet user requirements and make navigation of the website a pleasant experience.

Step 3: SEO

Jeffrey Labrecque, Web Advisor

SEO is a crucial step in the development of the website.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is where we analyze the search volume of keywords and how they are used on the Web. There are many tools available to help with this.

To get a general idea of the most effective keywords, we can use SEMrush with your existing website and compare the results to those of the competition. The goal is to determine the top-performing keywords for these websites in the search engine rankings. Then, using a keyword miner such as Keyword.io. Long lists of related keywords from a semantic point of view are compiled. Moz Keyword Explorer and Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool provide important SEO data such as keyword search volume and difficulty.

Google Trends can help identify search trends on Google. This tool can be used to, among other things, reveal the seasonality of certain terms and their usage in different geographical areas.

On-page SEO

In addition to identifying keywords, the structure of the information contained on the web pages must be optimized. There are several points to consider:

H1

Only use one H1 tag per page. In addition, the structure of the subtitles must be chronological. The best practice is to insert the keyword to be referenced at the beginning of the subtitle.

Meta

Meta-Description and Meta-Keyword tags help users understand what is contained on the web pages. A compelling description can increase the click rate (CTR) significantly. The keyword selected for a given page can also be inserted within these tags.

301 and 404

Make sure there are no broken links or Error 404s. Analyze your website’s internal links and identify which pages are referenced in the search results. To properly track these errors in Google Analytics, be sure to insert the error code, “404” in the title tag. To permanently remove these errors, you must configure a permanent redirect (301) to a relevant page.

URL

The page URLs should reflect the content of the web page. Here again, the ideal is to insert the keyword you are aiming for. Avoid complex website structures – your users should be able to easily understand the structure of your website by simply reading the URL.

HTTPS

An SSL certificate is used to secure a website as well as any data it may transfer. Google considers this so important that it prioritizes HTTPS secure sites for SEO. Hence, obtaining a security certificate for your site will help your SEO ranking and prevent the loss of visitors. In addition, some browsers, such as Google Chrome, display a message which indicates that the site does not have a valid SSL certificate and therefore can’t be trusted before the visitor can even enter it.

Step 4: Content

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