HOW IT WORKS

1. DELIVERY METHOD

Step 1 is to choose how you want to do the project. When it comes to your 2 day project, you will have a choice about whether you would like to work in-studio with your project manager, or via the "Launch 48 Satellite", which is our fancy way of saying you can work from home! It still only costs $3000, and you still get 2 days of dedicated time with a project manager, but you connect online, rather than in-person!

IN-STUDIO PROJECTS

If you choose to do your 2 day project in our creative studio, you come in and sit next to your project manager for 2 days, so if you're a hands-on learner that wants to be in the thick of the action, this method is perfect for you!

THIS METHOD IS PERFECT IF YOU:
Reside in or (close to) the Mississauga area
Prefer a hands-on style of learning
Describe yourself as "not tech-savvy"
Want a little extra attention from your P.M.

SATELLITE PROJECTS

If you choose to do a 2 day satellite project, then you connect with your P.M. over Skype, Slack or GoToMeeting, rather than coming into our studio. This is perfect if you can't get to our studio for 2 days, but still want quick results!

THIS METHOD IS PERFECT IF YOU:
Live outside of Mississauga / the GTA
Prefer a more visual style of learning
Have a more technical background
Prefer to be more self-directed

2. THE "GET READY LIST"

Step 2 is the "preparation" phase. Once you sign up, we'll invite you to a Basecamp project, where you can see a list of tasks to help you prepare for and complete your project, and a Google Drive folder to store any media assets like images and videos, logo files, and even written content that you want on your site.

You will also receive a copy of our Website Content Document, which will help you gather all the content and assets you need, and arrange that content into the pages you will have on your website.

With these tools, you will be able to gather and prepare everything in advance of our 2 days, plus we'll have time to review it and make sure we have everything we need! A little preparation goes a long way. A lot of preparation goes further.

3. THE 2-DAY SCHEDULE

Step 3 is the actual build portion. 2 days isn’t much time to design and build a website, and you play a big role in making sure the site is complete by the ned of day 2. We start training on Day 1 so you get as much experience as possible with WordPress, then you actually work alongside us to create and implement a design, providing input along the way. Our goal is to make sure you have all the knowledge / resources you need to manage your site going forward!

DAY 1

Agenda Setting

Strategy + Site Map

By now we have a good idea of your tastes and a preliminary vision of a final product, but design is equal parts function and form! We need to talk about a goal for the website, and think about how your user will move through it. This is when we discuss your objective - whether we want people to call, fill out a form, book a consultation, etc. - as well as calls to action to move users towards those objectives. We'll also think about what pages users will visit in which order, and use that to plan a user flow. We may not use every page you add to the Website Content Document, and we may end up adding pages or repurposing content to fit the objectives we set out, but this will depend on our discussion!

Design Wireframes

Using your objectives, our plan for user path, and the pages we agreed on, we will plan a unique but cohesive design that will help navigate your users to the end goals that you have set out, while simultaneously giving them the content they are looking for / expect. We will physically draw out every page on a whiteboard, and plan how users will engage with these pages. Once we have all the pages drawn up, we will review our designs and the overall user flow we have created to find out any gaps in the user experience that may need to be closed.

Morning Review

At this point we will have a big drawing of all the pages on the site, the user path will be planned out, and we will have a very rough idea of what the final product could look like. Of course, we won't know what images we're using, or even the specific verbiage we have for every page, but the drawings give us the blueprints for every part of the site. These basic designs influence the build portion of the site, so it's important to get approvals on each page right from the start - a change to design later in the day might influence more than just the one page, which is why we put the big picture design together early and get your sign off. Your approval will signify acknowledgment that the sitemap we have drawn is the complete list of pages that we will see on the site. We will take pictures of the approved sitemap and upload it to this task to be referred to as needed.

Lunch Time! Woo!

Set Build Order

The home page is always the first page we build, but we will use this time to talk about what common factors will exist on all pages, and build backwards from there. If several pages have the same elements, we will build templates that allow us to duplicate content rather than create it from scratch for every page. We will use our approved page designs to plan the build based on a variety of factors like complexity and commonality. Depending on the design, there may only be 3-4 different pages, because several pages have similar setups and can use the same basic structure, with different content. By knowing all the designs in advance, this process goes much smoother.

Build Home Page

Training Block 1

Full Build Starts

For the majority of the build portion, we divide and conquer! Your project manager will go through and create pages using placeholder content, and when each page is finished structurally, you will go in and add content. The content you brought with you may not be in the right format for the design that has been drawn up, so while your project manager builds the pages to the specifications of the page drawings, you will be tasked with repurposing or re-writing your content to fit those same drawings. This portion of the project is time-intensive for the project manager, as they will be the ones creating all the pages and adding basic layouts, so your role will primarily be sourcing or gathering content to be used for these pages. As your project manager completes a design, you will be tasked with adding the content into that design. We will do each page one at a time, and will try to get through as many pages as possible before end of day.

Page 1 Review

DAY 2

Agenda Setting

Continue Build

We build a page, you add content, we build a page, you add content. Rinse and repeat. This part of the process is heads-down, focused work that will take us through the rest of the morning. It's critical that we make good time in this portion, especially if we didn't get many pages complete the first day. If we have a lot of written content, your project manager might task you with finding images for the pages, or writing your first blog, but the focus of this time is to complete the remaining pages.

What a busy couple of days it has been! At this point we should be wrapping up finalized design and content on every page, and it's time to get final sign off. This sign-off indicates that everything from design to content to function is all according to specifications prior to launch. This does not mean the site is complete and we can go home, it just means that the game plan has been set and was stuck to. Not every project will reach this point before the end of day 2, and even if it ready to go live, not every client is ready to sign off. However, to keep to our 2 day timeline, we do need to have some kind of approval that the work done so far has been according to specifications set forth in the beginning. This ensures that our projects stay in scope, and that you have a product to show off at the end of your 2 days. Remember, your website should be a continuous focus and you should want to update it over time, so if you have hesitations about the site being "ready" just remember that your site will never be 100% perfect - your site's visitors' needs will change, your goals will change, and your website should change accordingly.

SEO Training

This is when we review your site's search engine optimization to see how your pages would fare in a search engine like Google or Bing. We will do our best to perfect your content but keep in mind, as hard as we're working to get on the first page of those search results, your competitors are working just as hard. That's why we focus on teaching you principles rather than just doing the work for you - we will work on a few pages together, but then you will be able to put in ongoing SEO efforts in the future. We assess the pages based on probable keywords people will use and then an SEO plugin we use provides recommendations on things to improve and change. We make a few changes, maybe modify the content on the pages a little bit and then green means go! Having a good baseline at launch time is going to give you a good starting point, and then over time you can adapt or redirect your SEO efforts to further improve your rankings!

Site Testing

Design Tweaks

Launch Time! Celebrate!

If you're hosting with us, we would login to your hosting company's control panel to change the A record for the site and point it to the website we just built together. It will take a few hours for the change to take affect, but that is the only change we have to make. If you're not hosting with us, we package up all the WordPress files and SQL database and give them to you to launch on your server. You would need to talk to your hosting company or IT department to manage this as we are not able to launch a site on an external server.

9 AM

Welcome + Agenda Setting