Our web design and development process is proven and loved by our clients because it makes developing their website straightforward. Everyone loves having a clear roadmap we have yours!

1. Deep Pre-Design Strategic Research

Every Moon & Owl site design starts with our Get To Know You exercise. This comprehensive document allows us to get a real feel for business or organization including your site needs, style preferences, and key competitors.

We’ll also get a list of preliminary terms you’d guess people would search to find what you offer. Don’t worry; you can just make guesses and suggestions as you’ll see below.

Your site needs to be structured in a way that makes sense to the user and to search engines, where your users will find you.

This is where we are a step ahead of the competition. Before the design begins, we need to determine what keywords do people use when looking for a service or product you offer.

We use powerful tools to find out the searches phrases related to your service or product, how often these terms are searched, and how much competition exists for each keyword. We can even spy on your competitors to see what keywords they are attempting to rank on.

This strategic phase is also the time in which we’ll decide what platform on which to build your site. We have extensive experience in WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, Shopify, and many other content management system platforms. We’ll tell you the why behind our recommendations.

We'll also determine if you need e-commerce capabilities to sell things online, a reservations system, an online forum, a blog, or other key functionalities. We’ll present a plan on how we will incorporate these into the site.

2. Sitemap Creation

A sitemap is simply an outline of your pages on your site.

Sometimes this sitemap might be quite simple.

But even if you sell a single product or service, there are several ways people will search for your offerings. Each of these search approaches needs to be accounted for in the sitemap.

Sometimes your sitemap will be complex like this Moon & Owl client.

web designer sitemap

Example Sitemap

This is one of the most important parts of web design and development where most agencies skimp. When an agency rushes or skips this process, and later you want to do some search engine optimization, an SEO specialist will then say, “Basically we’re going to have to rebuild about half the site because it isn’t built right.” Not with Moon & Owl.

(By the way, we do great SEO work and its easy on your site since we built it with that end-game in mind).

3. Content Writing

Great web writing is a like a great song lyric. You can change the musical style under the lyric, but it still works.

Many web designers will design a pretty site and then say, “Okay, email all your content.” This is completely backward.

Why?

Content drives design.

The look of your site should reinforce the purpose of the content.

Before we ever move into your design process, we craft your site's content to be an honest reflection of who you are, compelling, and convincing.

We help you craft your message with our Brand Voicing Session (we charge $1500 a la carte to clients, but its included it in your web package as an added value, because we know it's crucial.)

When you get your Brand Voicing Report, you’ll have a powerful tool to help you in all your future communication and writing. You’ll know the buzzwords to use that explain how you are different.

This Brand Voicing Report guides our writers, so your content is tight and focused.

Your site speaks to the end-users perspective. How does what you do or sell benefit them?

It sounds harsh, but no one really cares what you do. They care how you directly benefit them. Our content specialists understand this.

Even when telling your story on your About Us page, we write it in a way that points out “here is how we are going to help you.”

Your content is then professionally proofed and edited so it zings and doesn't s