What to Expect When You're Providing: Website Feedback!
Aspire is a creative agency here in Christiansburg, Virginia. We’re constantly sending websites for review and receiving feedback on them with our customers, near and far.
For many people, this might be the first time you’ve contracted with a team to create a website for you. Even if it isn’t, working with us is different–and we like to think that’s a good thing.
We keep the process simple. There’s two rounds of revisions, a transfer process, and then a quality assurance audit afterward. Start-to-finish, we’re here to support you and your business. We even streamline things a step further for new businesses with our one-stop website package: here.
How does it work?
We keep the process as simple as possible. After the initial intake and questionnaire process, we build out your site. We look at templates and examples of what you might like and build from there. Once the basics are created and the site’s functionality is built out, we send the site to you for review.
We’re always happy to create a site that conforms to existing style and branding guides as well. At a minimum, every site we build is mobile-friendly, accessible for screen readers and captioning, and optimized initially for search engine optimization (SEO).
Two Revisions – What should I look for in the first round?
Most of our website projects are set up so that each website goes through three rounds of revision:
We have an internal review meeting twice a week, where our production team goes through each website we put out and offers feedback before a client ever sees it.
After that, you’ll have a chance to see two revisions. More on that below!
Once that’s complete, we’re ready to do any domain transfer you need and get your site live!
Round one, we want your first impressions
Do you like it? How does it look on your phone? What about on your tablet? Or that BIG display in your office?
A lot is possible at this point–within the bounds of good user experience, accessibility, and our expertise when it comes to creating sites that perform well.
If there’s something you don’t like, now is the time to voice those concerns! If we don’t receive feedback like that until the end, there will be production delays and added cost–which nobody wants!
When you see the first round of a website, some things are going to seem a little off:
Content isn’t finalized
In many places on the site, we’ll likely be using filler text. That’s called Lorem Ipsum in the industry. Lorem Ipsum is a dummy text that was first used in the printing and typesetting industries. Website developers and designers use it too!
If you see text like this:
Nam tellus tortor, tempus id velit sed, scelerisque euismod enim. Quisque sit amet justo eget nisi porta vestibulum. Morbi luctus mi non tempor feugiat. Nam pretium vestibulum dapibus. Vestibulum non mi libero. Praesent leo sem, laoreet ut justo eu, scelerisque congue lorem. Etiam egestas nunc velit, eu rhoncus lacus dignissim.
Remember, don’t fret! We’ll fill that in with your content before the second round.
Right now, we want to make sure you like the look and feel of the site. It takes a little imagination to do this–that’s normal! If we created each piece of content to be perfectly optimized at this step, though, we’d be wasting your time and money. Content comes during part two.
Some pages might still be generic or look a little like a “wireframe”
Wireframing is a standard practice in this industry that allows us to allocate space and prioritize how we’ll be displaying the content we create for your project. For some of our larger projects, this becomes a big part of the process.
You might see one or two placeholder images or a piece of stock footage if we’re not finished with a video, for example.
If you see anything that looks unpolished or incomplete, always know that all that will be complete before we go live! Generally, we’re building visual content out concurrently with a project. We want to deliver the best photography and videography every time, so there’s occasionally some delay between website edits and the event or subject we’re covering for you.
We want to get your first impression when we’re at this step–only about 50% complete. If structural changes need to be made here, that’s okay. We can always make changes. That brings us to round two…
Round two, it’s go time! Every detail is important:
When we deliver round two, the site is 95% complete. The words are real words now. You recognize yourself in the pictures and love them.
It should be down to little things now, almost ready for us to point the site towards the public and let your customers flow in.
When you review a site on round two, we recommend playing around an awful lot:
View the site on lots of different screens. Try to break something!
Click links. Click on images. Do “weird” things–your customers certainly will be.
We want you to pick everything apart. Details are everything here!
If something isn’t working for you, now’s the time to comment. This second round should look like a finished product and just about ready to start sharing to the world.
Be Specific!
The first round of edits should have fixed everything major. We’re down to minor details now–so if something seems off, be specific. Our goal here is to provide a final product right after this round so you can hit your deadlines and start putting your site out into the world.
Remember: we can fix “The contact form didn’t let me add my full name in the box”.
We can’t fix “It looks funny.
Final delivery! Time to send this thing out into the world
After we go through two rounds of edits and make any small, last minute changes. It’s time to debut! At this point, you should feel like you’re receiving a product that is your vision brought to life.
From here, we’ll set up a time to meet with you and transfer the site to your correct domain name. This can get complicated but we’ve done it countless times–you won’t stump us. Just make sure you know the username and password of your current hosting provider and registrar. If you don’t, we can help with that too!
During this meeting, we’ll also provide you with website training that is specifically tailored for your needs. Generally, we’re turning you loose at this point. We want to make sure you have a plan for keeping things updated, whether that’s a retainer agreement with us or training for your staff.
Once the site is live, we’ll create a series of backups of the content and make sure you have all the permissions to make changes from here. Important: If you don’t have a backup of your “old” site, you’ll want to do that before we turn the new site live. We recommend a local copy of your site using https://www.httrack.com/. Even if you don’t plan to ever go back, you never know when you might want that old blog post or special explanation page that you were sure about abandoning before.
We provide a transition period of two weeks, following the final invoice date, for you to ask questions, ask us to make minor modifications, or fix something we missed like a typo or incorrect link.
If you need something on this project from here, just get in touch. We can always provide you with a quote to iterate on a project. Perhaps you want to change your domain name or add a page for your new services. We’re well-versed in all of that, so don’t hesitate! We’re obsessed with creating websites that will work for years here and want to show all that a small creative shop is capable of.
Questions for us? Reach out today!
