This will include a thorough review of your website, its goals, primary audience, and a comparison against your competition, as well as websites you might want to emulate. This only goes as far as visuals and doesn’t always include coding.

Don’t take for granted that your design firm will supply the imagery you will use throughout your website. If you have a lot of product photography that needs to be showcased on your site, consider how those images will be collected, organized, and prepared to be featured
online.

Development is the portion of the project where a web developer actually writes the code for your website to properly render in a web browser. Depending on the skill set you have in house, or how much you want to control project costs, development can be executed by agency staff or members of your team. When making this decision, bear in mind how much time you can afford from your in-house developer’s daily tasks in order to write code for new pages.

The implementation of your designs is the process of converting the developed code to templates within your content management system that any content contributor can use to create and update pages without being able to alter the design.

Your team will need the ability to manage and update website content on an ongoing basis, long after the site launches. A web CMS is the best way to make that easy. Content management systems are usually proprietary software with their own license costs. Some open source solutions have no immediate price tag, but will require additional custom development and implementation from a design partner, and that means incurring more cost. The latter often means the initial cost of redesigning and launching a site is lower, but the ongoing cost is much higher. Do your research to understand your options.

A website needs somewhere to live, as does the CMS it runs on. That place is a server. Some businesses have the resources to do their own hosting, but there are many hosting and cloud solutions than can manage servers and software for you. These could carry additional costs and should figure into the project budget.

Without content, your website is not worth much. Just as a bad design can make great content irrelevant, poorly written and organized content can undermine the power of a great design. This is another part of the project you can take on with your inhouse team, with the understanding that it will consume a lot of time, or decide to outsource at least in part.

If you’re ready to make a major investment in your website by redesigning it, there’s no better time to engage the services of an SEO firm, but this of course introduces added cost. Read the search engine optimization section in the Pre-Launch chapter to decide whether to include SEO in your project budget.

The redesign project might be complete once your website is live, but the website itself is never really “finished.” You will continue to update content, modify design, test performance, and optimize for conversions. Whether you can take on these functions internally or want to outsource them to a third party is going to affect the ongoing cost of keeping it running.