The website market offers a lot of products and a lot of companies, at prices and service levels that differ enormously. If a business needs a custom corporate site built, what does the process actually involve, and how do you choose a supplier you can rely on?
The advantage of a custom build is straightforward. Professional designers and a technical team build to your requirement, end to end. The disadvantage is that it places real demands on the supplier: design capability, technical depth, company scale, all of it has to be assessed rather than assumed.
1. Research the requirement
Start with a proper investigation: what the company does, what distinguishes it, what it is good at, what it sells. Who the site is for. Who the competitors are and what they have done. What the brand guidelines and the design preferences are, and what the site is meant to achieve over the next few years.
This stage is where a serious supplier and a sales operation diverge most obviously, because it is the stage a sales operation skips.
2. Turn the research into a specification
The content framework, the navigation, the things that have to be visible on the home page, the layout approach for each page type.
After the research and the analysis, a competent company brings a detailed development proposal and walks through it: what will be built, why, and what it will look like. Ask for this before discussing budget. A supplier whose first questions are about budget and whose second is a price is a supplier with very little technical knowledge to offer, and if the requirement was never understood, the result is predictable.
3. The build process
Once the proposal is agreed and the contract signed, the project starts with a kickoff meeting. The project group, made up of the planner, the project manager, the design team and the build team, confirms the requirement, the workflow and the timeline, and issues a schedule for the whole project. From that you can see exactly what happens when.
4. Design
The design team produces first drafts against the agreed direction. A good practice is to present two different styles for each key page: one following the client’s stated direction, one following the designer’s own judgement. The designer then explains what each does and why.
Once the home page is signed off, the same treatment is applied to the inner pages section by section, each presented and confirmed. Expect seven to fifteen working days for this stage.
5. Build, and the SEO that goes with it
After design sign-off, the front-end team builds each page, tests compatibility, confirms the result, then hands over to back-end development.
This is the stage that reveals technical depth, and SEO is where to look. Does every image have an alt attribute? Is there a title, description and keyword set for each page? Are URLs customisable? Is there a sitemap, a 301 redirect mechanism, a proper 404? Is the code structure sound, and is the site hierarchy kept within three levels?
A good supplier will demonstrate all of this at handover rather than leave you to discover it. It should also explain how to keep doing SEO afterwards, because a site is not finished when it launches.
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Shenzhen XZS Technology Co., Ltd. · Tel 0755-82494862 · 13760424861