Website Launch Flowchart

With our roots in the entrepreneurial world, we frequently get involved with clients at the very beginning of both their business and website. To be as helpful as possible, we thought ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have something visual that shows everything we intend to do”.

Off we went to our trusty search engines, searching for things like website design, website development and our new favorite ‘website launch’. While there were some fairly straightforward charts for website design, nothing really captured the essence of what we do – take people from nothing to fully functional websites that are capable of generating income. So we put together the website launch flowchart – what we refer to internally as our optimized design methodology.

So more people have a visual guide to see how optimized web design, development and marketing come together, we wanted to make our flowchart available. Web design doesn’t exist in a vacuum nor does marketing. The most optimized, easiest functioning and best performing sites are those that find a balance between design, content, business tool complexity and marketing integration.

Basically the flowchart can be broken down into a few sections (which may or may not be specifically applicable to any given project). We start by understanding the purpose of the site and create some initial ideas around it (since we’re a business we generally create a proposal from the specification). Once the project is underway, we revisit the initial ideas and start to develop them more thoroughly – we utilize wireframes, work on a basic information architecture and begin to develop an integrated online marketing strategy (launch and ongoing). We may also have to create logos or other business identity pieces, but let’s assume that’s been done.

After approval, we begin work on 2 parallel paths, content assembly and business tool integration. Basically, we pull all the text, images and other media together and connect it to whatever is driving the site features – database, CMS, shopping cart, etc. We also plug in some type of analytics. All the while, we’re keeping an eye on what marketing channels we’re going to use and making sure there aren’t any conflicting requirements.

Once all this is put together, the site is pretty close to launch capable, but it’s usually still hidden away on one of our test servers. When it’s been tested and given the green light by our client, we go live and it’s off to the marketing races. Often, we’ll even begin some of the marketing before launch.

Since pictures are easier to understand than jumbles of words, we hope this provides you with a single visual reference that captures the full website launch process. Feel free to use this freely (without modification). Additional file versions are available Website Launch Flowchart.

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