The website is make-or-break for companies today, which means building a new website or redesigning your current site is a process that simply has to be done right.
A thorough understanding of your company, your offerings, and your customers is needed to develop a site that looks great and provides an experience your customers and search engines will love.
Building your site on the HubSpot CMS with ManoByte means you get expert design, development, and site strategy support with the ease of HubSpot’s drag-and-drop page editor. Our website build process has four main phases:
- Kickoff
- Strategy Development
- Build & Launch
- Post-Launch Support
The complete website build process depends on the complexity and size of your site but generally takes three (3) to six (6) months. Being engaged with the process helps streamline activities and prevents a delayed site launch.
Kickoff Meeting
To get started on your new website, you’ll meet with your Client Success Manager and the members of our team who will be working on your website. In general, these roles include:
- Developers
- Designers
- Digital Marketing Specialists
- Content Specialist
During the 30-minute kickoff meeting, you’ll be introduced to your team, then we’ll review your company, the goals for your website, and the proposal to ensure we’re on the same page. Then, we’ll go over the next steps for your website project. In many cases, the next step is to dive into our strategy.
Estimated time for this phase: 1 day
Strategy
During the strategy phase, we conduct a couple of audits of the existing website to understand its current performance in more detail. Then, we craft buyer personas and buyers' journey maps for how your customers should be converting on your website.
We’ll then present our findings to you in a Strategy Review Meeting. The goal of this meeting is to ensure our strategy findings are in line with the goals for your site we defined earlier. Once approved, we’ll use the strategy to design your website.
Estimated time for the full strategy phase: 4-6 weeks
Website Audit
In the website audit, the digital marketing specialist exports all of your website page analytics and examines how they’re doing on a page-by-page scale. They’ll look at metrics like:
- Page views: Total page views in the last 90 days
- Bounce rate: Percentage of viewers who clicked on and then off of the page without looking at any other site pages
- Average session length: Average time spent on the page
- Traffic sources: Sources include organic search and social, paid search and social, direct traffic, and referrals
- Ranking keywords: We use the application ahrefs to scan your site and understand the pages ranking on Google, what keywords they rank for, and what position they’re in.
All this information helps us build a redirect strategy and SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. These strategies help us build the site to maintain and improve rankings for target keywords.
The digital marketing specialist will also conduct a competitor analysis, which includes a review of your top three competitors’ websites. This identifies their pitfalls and how we can build your new site to create a better visitor experience.
Estimated time: 1 week
Buyer Persona Development & Journey Mapping
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. The content specialist will develop 2-5 buyer personas based on your target markets. The persona will identify:
- Demographic information
- Job title and salary range
- Job challenges and pain points
- Preferred sources of information
A finished buyer persona will look like this:
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Independent Practitioner Pat |
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Education Level |
Medical Doctor (MD) |
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Job Title & Salary |
Medical Practice Owner, $162K/year |
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Job Challenges |
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Sources of Information |
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Using the buyer personas, we’ll develop journey maps that show conversion points using existing content and opportunities for new content to fill gaps in the journey.
Understanding your buyers, their challenges, and their habits helps create a website that is tailored to the experience they’re looking for, which adds force to your marketing and sales flywheel.
Estimated time: 2 weeks
Website Specifics
Your client success manager and content specialist will develop a page list and outlines for each of the major pages during this stage. This is important as it will outline the structure of your site.
We’ll review the current page list for the website and decide what pages to bring over to the new one, what pages may be combined, and what new pages are needed. We’ll then create a sitemap with the page list to show how the website’s navigation and structure will look.
Once the site map is complete, the content specialist will create an outline of the content to be included on each major page. The designer and developer will use these outlines to design and build the pages, including what theme modules will be needed for the drag-and-drop editor in HubSpot.
Estimated time: 1 week
Strategy Overview Meeting
After our team has compiled all our resources and developed a strategy, we’ll present the complete strategy to you during a meeting where you can ask questions and provide additional insights and information where needed. This meeting lasts around a full hour.
After the meeting, you will have the opportunity to review the strategy presentation deck and ask additional questions, and both you and our team can make adjustments. Reviewing and finalizing the strategy is critical as the strategy is what informs the website build.
Not finalizing the strategy in a timely manner will result in a delayed start to the website build.
Estimated time: 1 week
Build & Launch
The build phase includes the creation, development, testing, and launch of your new website. Several of the items in this phase happen simultaneously as our team works to build out your website.
Estimated time for the entire build and launch phase: 12-14 weeks
Redirect Strategy
The redirect strategy will use the existing page list and the page list for the new site to determine what new pages the old URLs will redirect to. This strategy minimizes the risk of 404 errors, which can impact your site’s standing with Google. When a user enters a URL that no longer exists, a redirect tells the browser to go to the new page instead.
Estimated time: 1 week
Mockups
With an approved site map, page list, and content outlines, the designer will get to work on creating mockups of the major website pages, like the homepage, About, and Product/Service pages. These mockups will be visual representations of how the content will appear on the webpages.
Generally, we’ll start with the homepage mockup to ensure we’re headed in the right direction. This homepage mockup will have drafted text for the website as well to make sure the tone and style are in-line with your brand.
After getting approval on the homepage mockup, the designer will create mockups for the remaining major pages based on the content outlines. These mockups will likely contain placeholder text and are to help you see the direction of the website.
Estimated time: 2 weeks
Development
Once the mockups are approved, the developer will use the mockups to build templates for each of the major page styles. This includes:
- Importing a site theme or building a custom one
- Developing custom modules not included in the site theme
- Building the website’s global header and footer
- Building system pages, such as the 404 page
- Building the page templates
- Initial testing of modules and templates
Depending on the number of pages, modules, and custom development work needed, this phase can take a while. During this time, content creation is happening, as is the redirect strategy. Site build can also begin as the developer completes templates.
Estimated time: 3-4 weeks
Page Build
As the developer completes page templates and content is finished, the page build can begin. During the page build, the entire team for your website will:
- Create the pages in the HubSpot content staging area
- Add content and images to the pages
- Create HubDB tables, if needed
- Update the links on pages, as completed
Like development, page build takes more time if there are a lot of pages or complex modules.
Estimated time: 3-4 weeks
Quality Assurance (QA)
Once the site build is complete, it’s time for QA testing. First, our team will complete an internal QA to look for errors or issues with the site across all device styles (desktop, mobile, and tablet) and major browsers (Safari, Firefox, Chrome).
During the QA test, we carefully comb through the site and fix issues regarding:
- Content (typos, misspellings, missing content)
- Display (spacing, imagery, etc.)
- Structure (linking, header, footer, etc.)
- Function (forms, hover animations, etc.)
After we’ve finished our QA, we’ll meet with you to walk through the site, then your team will conduct your own QA. Your team will make note of all changes in a Google Doc for us to fix after your QA is complete.
To avoid a “too many cooks” situation during your QA, we recommend no more than five (5) people on your team review the site at this stage.
We’ll go back and make changes, then your team will have one more pass-through of the site before it’s launch time.
Estimate time: 3 weeks
Launch
After all of the QA changes are complete and the site is ready to go, it’s time to launch! We’ll decide on a day and time to launch the site with you. We don’t recommend launching on Fridays. In case there are major issues with the site, our team would not be able to address them until Monday.
On launch day, we’ll publish all the site pages from the staging environment to the domain and run a live QA to catch any final errors. Our team will again go through the site and fix small errors or update linking as needed. We’ll ensure everything is running smoothly across devices and browsers, then let you know the new site is live and running!
At this time, we’ll also set up any redirects by uploading the redirect spreadsheet into HubSpot.
Estimated time: 1 day
30 Days of Post-Launch Support
All website projects include 30 days of post-launch support.
If you have questions or concerns following your site’s launch, send your client success manager an email with the details, and they can assist and pull in other team members as needed.