The Process in Building your Brochure Website

The services that overhaul industries provides to small businesses and are more than just designing and building websites. It is our desire to provide a solution for you that answers the questions and objections of your audience allowing your website to act as your extended voice. The first step in the process of building your website is scoping the project, to do so we need to ask the important questions; the same questions your prospects and clients ask you.

One of the first questions we ask is: “Who is your primary audience?” We want to understand the viewpoint and needs of the people your website will speak to. With a description of your audience, we use this data as a ‘persona’ -  during each part of the site build, we refer to the persona to check that the design and content objectives meet the needs and expectations of the target audience. We also need to identify the secondary audience that your website will address. How would you describe the demographics of your audience? How would they describe themselves? We would rather not start working on the design and development of your website until we understand these personas’ needs; and when your preparations ready. At the onset of your project, we provide a ‘How to prepare’ document. One of the biggest hindrances to the completing a website project is when one of the parties (client or vendor) is not continuing to provide the materials needed for the next step(s); it can be discouraging if the project stalls. We would like you to prepar all the content for your brochure website before we accept your deposit.

Once your content and deposit are completed, it’s simple to build your website. We will provide you up to 3 variations on our standard ‘Overhaul Brochure’ theme; we will choose a color scheme that fits your existing logo or brochure (branding). If you don’t have any marketing materials yet, we will create a new visual design that is professional and appealing to your audience.

The process for implementing your new website

After your content document is prepared (you have gathered your photos and images to illustrate your content), we generate an outline and scope for your website. Then we begin to implement the visual design for your website in a staging (pre-live) environment. It’s basically a two-step process. You provide the content and we build the website; we provide guidance for preparing your content as well.

With proper preparation, it should only take a few days to develop your brochure website. Once you review the web pages and experience the staging environment you can approve the website, after you give your approval just pay the remainder of the balance; then we will deploy your website on a live server using your domain for the world to view and the search engines to index your targeted content.

This process of deploying your website involves setting up an hosting account which Overhaul Industries provides for you. The hosting service includes email and FTP for file transfers. We manage the service for you and configure the account to fit your website needs. If you have an existing service for email, you may continue with the service without interruption; or, we can plan a migration to establish the new hosted email service. If you have questions about hosting just ask, we are happy to explain the services. The requirement to launch your website will be to change the name servers that your domain resolves to. This done using the control panel provided by the company that you registered your domain with; we use GoDaddy, perhaps you use Network Solutions or Yahoo. We will help you through this process. Once the name servers are changed, the domain will propagate within about 24-48 hours. We often notice that local services resolve within an hour or so; but, it is best to go-live on a weekend or at a time when the change will not affect your business. Prior to the name server change we will email you the automatic configuration instructions for setting up your email account(s) on your client software (e.g. Outlook, Mac Mail, etc.).

Following the launch of the domain and website, Overhaul Industries helps search engines to recognize your new site or content. We create a few inbound links from highly indexed websites that basically tell Google, “Hey look here!” We also create a sitemap and submit it to Google. By using the WordPress platform to manage your website, we expect that search engines will begin to crawl your site within hours or days. (There can be some circumstances that would prevent this, but we often create a site targeting relevant keywords and notice results in Google within a short period of time.)

After your website is live

We train you to use the dynamic publishing system (WordPress) that is used to manage the content of your website. The control panel is very user friendly and the community of users is active, enthusiastic and supportive. We offer warranty and maintenance periods to insure that your project is implemented properly. This creates room for you to adapt the site content, or launch early adding additional content when you are ready.

Content management involves creating/editing ‘pages’ or ‘posts’. We build the foundation and category structure that fits your business objectives for the website. You only need to keep up the momentum. We suggest that you set dates for publishing new (short) articles on topics like case studies or testimonies; these will be the categories that you publish the articles under. Your website will feature a tool that informs (each time you post a new article) various other websites about the new addition to your website; this helps to improve the authority of your website. There will be an XML feed that your visitors can subscribe to with email or RSS readers. If you are an iPhone user, there is an application that you can publish to your website using your phone. We can even create a special email address that you can send messages to publish articles automatically. With Google Voice or other voice transcription services you may even consider publishing to your website by leaving voicemail messages. We will help you plan for the success of your website!