Our Website Design & Build Process
Bringing your new website to life should be a fun experience and that’s what we aim to achieve with our simple four step process. We kickstart with finding out exactly what you want and need before moving on to designing the layout and look of the site, checking in with you at every stage. We keep you involved throughout the build and testing, so you’re fully in the know about how your new site is coming along - we may be at the wheel of your site build but you’ll be steering the ship.
The likes and dislikes of web design can often come down to personal preference and with our website design & build process, we like to think we’re able to achieve a happy medium of what you want and what you need to ensure your site looks great and performs even better.
eCommerce Website Design
The end goal of your eCommerce website is to generate conversions. Your website is the online equivalent to your high-street store, so if the user experience isn’t up to standard, then you can expect sales to be slow.
The Ideate team is highly experienced in eCommerce web development on both Shopify and Wordpress. We’re knowledgeable on the features that truly convert on an eCommerce site and are able to create a bespoke design for your website that is responsive, SEO-thinking, smooth-running and of course, great looking. Combined, this gives you a recipe for conversion.
Alongside building eCommerce websites, we’re able to support the ongoing maintenance and development, be it uploading new products, updating existing product descriptions or transforming your site to host those all-important promotional events. We can take the weight off your in-house team day to day and during your busiest trading times.
Building fast, responsive websites that show off your business and look good on all devices.
In a world of ever-changing technology with new devices entering the market all the time, responsive web design has never been more important. Our web designs are developed with all devices in mind, ensuring that each website is responsive to mobile, tablet, laptops and any other screen they may be viewed on.
We use a range of modern build techniques to ensure content is adaptable and the layout is fluid, so your customers get a great user experience on every device.
No website passes through the Ideate doors without being fully SEO ready. All of our web designs are developed with search engines in mind and our built with all the required technical SEO in place and on-page SEO, such as great on-page content, produced and published at launch.
By creating websites with SEO at the forefront, we set a great standard to be maintained as your site continues to grow and change with you. We pride ourselves on launching sites that search engines love.
No one likes waiting around for web pages to load, and that includes both your customers and search engines.
Newly launched websites can often boast slow loading speeds due to poorly uploaded content and a lack of Technical SEO knowledge but by choosing the Ideate team to champion your web design and build, you’re getting a website backed with technical knowledge, ensuring it can load at optimum speeds from day one and beyond.
Websites often begin to perform poorly due to not being properly maintained. The technical features that once made it great can be overpowered by broken links and poorly uploaded content, causing it to slow down and become difficult for search engines to crawl and index.
Our website maintenance and support services ensure you have experts on-hand at all times, not just for when things go wrong but for the day to day TLC your site needs to continue to perform at its optimum.
As a team, we have years of combined experience working on Wordpress for both eCommerce and B2B businesses. We’re highly skilled in both building Wordpress sites and offering ongoing maintenance and support on the platform.
So, if you’re looking for an agency to bring your brand-new Wordpress site to life, and that can look after it for you going forward, you’ve come to the right place. We work tirelessly to keep our Wordpress knowledge up to date, so we can transfer these skills in to making your website as effective and highly converting as possible.
The eCommerce platform of choice for many, we’re well versed in what it takes to build and maintain a great Shopify website that not only looks good but converts highly too.
We work closely with the Shopify team to ensure our knowledge is up to date and we’re able to build, launch and maintain innovative and quality Shopify sites for a range of eCommerce clients in different sectors.
150%
Increase in traffic YOY
SEO
Digital PR
Technical SEO
ARRAN Sense of Scotland
128
DA40+ links generated
SEO
Digital PR
Wish Dental
116%
Increase in website conversion rate
WordPress
Website Design
SEO
Soccer Coach Weekly
150%
Increase in traffic YOY
SEO
PPC
CRO
ICON Projects
150%
WordPress speed score
WordPress
Web Design and Build
Temper
19.1
ROAS with a £2.08 cost per cover
PPC
Mint Finance
XXX
WordPress speed xxx
WordPress
Web Design and Build
Here are some frequently asked questions relating to Website Design and Development.
We could say ‘how long is a piece of string’ but to give some context, our approach to web design is not ‘out of the box’ or one size fits all and therefore, it’s impossible to put a definitive timeframe on how long it will take to design and build your specific website.
The simpler the website, the faster the design and build process will be. Expectedly, the less design elements, pages and functionality a site has, the quicker it is to build and get live. This is due to less technical work required and also less time testing due to there being less pages to test. The more complex a website gets in terms of design and functionality, the longer it will take.
However, we believe that good things are worth waiting for, so even if your website is going to take a little longer to bring to life, we’re confident it’ll be worth it.
Similarly to ‘how long does it take to build a website’, the cost of a website design and build is bespoke to your brief. Every website is different in its own way and understandably, this is the reason we quote each website individually, opposed to offering an ‘off the shelf’ pricing structure.
To provide you with an estimate of price, the simpler and smaller the scope of your website, the more affordably priced it will be. Technical elements, complex functionality and bespoke design will all add to the cost of your website but these features can also provide a huge return on investment if they aid the user experience, so ‘the cheaper the better’ isn’t necessarily the case with web design.
A wireframe is best described as an initial blueprint of your website’s layout and structure. Wireframes are used as an initial plan to decide whether the flow of your website feels right and is the best time to start making tweeks to the layout and navigation before deep diving into the design.
We use a two phase approach to wireframing: low fidelity which is purely a mapping exercise of your website’s layout and then high fidelity, which starts to incorporate design elements, so you can make some final decisions on the overall look and feel before we go to build.
Wireframing is arguably one of the most important stages of web design as it really is the groundwork for what your site will become.
Our web builds are primarily based on either Wordpress or Shopify. We have strong relationships with both platforms and years of experience designing and building within their software and therefore feel confident delivering exceptional quality websites on these platforms.
Wordpress is one of the most popular website platforms on the market and therefore naturally we work with a lot of clients here. The software is fantastic for SEO and extremely well supported across the board, including a range of plug-ins which can really elevate website functionality.
Shopify is a firm favourite for eCommerce customers and understandably so. The platform is built for this type of site and is proven to deliver highly on conversions and user experience.
Yes we can! Not all web projects require starting from scratch and an existing website can have huge potential to be improved and developed into a higher performing and converting site.
We will undertake a full audit of existing GA4 data and use heatmaps to make a factual assessment of what is working and what isn’t working on the current website and use this to inform a plan as to what design and functionality changes would be beneficial.
We are then able to pick up a variation of our 4-step design and build process to deliver the reworks on your existing site, whilst also ensuring existing SEO credibility is retained.
As part of our web build process, we ensure that clients are able to make content and image changes easily. We understand that keeping a website up to date is an essential part of improving the SEO credibility and user experience, so being able to add and change content yourself allows this process to be more time effective.
Upon the launch of a new website, we provide a training session to all relevant members of the clients’ team, so everyone is familiar with how to use the site and make content changes.
As for layout changes and technical or functionality work, we recommend a maintenance plan which we are able to provide via development hours on a monthly basis.
This work can be complex and have a huge impact on the live site if done incorrectly, so we don’t recommend taking on this work yourself.
Yes! As mentioned previously, we offer training upon launch to anyone within your business who may need to use the backend of the website. We walk you through your new site and its functionality, as well as the backend platform and areas where you can make changes.
We remain on-hand in the following weeks to ensure the site doesn’t experience any severe teething issues and if it does, we’re on hand to fix them.
We also offer our maintenance package which gives you monthly support with layout and functionality work.
Responsive design is a form of web design that ensures your website’s look and functionality adapts to different device types seamlessly. We access websites across a variety of devices and screen sizes nowadays and therefore any good website should be responsive to the device it is being viewed and change accordingly. This can include layout changes and functionality changes that fit both the view on the device and the way in which a device is used, for example, is it touch screen or do you use a mouse.
Responsive design makes your website usable across all devices, ensuring it is suitable and a high quality experience for all users at all times.
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google uses to measure the performance of your website, and how user-friendly it is, which then helps to inform the search engine’s decisions on your rankings in the search results - a key part of SEO.
The three Core Web Vitals are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures the time it takes to fully load the largest piece of content on the web page. This will usually be the main hero image, a video, or a large piece of text.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP is a relatively new metric, and replaced the old metric ‘First Input Delay (FID) at the end of 2024. In simple terms, it measures the interactivity of your web page, and how long your page takes to respond to user interactions on the page.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures how visually stable the web page is as it loads, and looks at how often users experience unexpected layout shifts that may confuse them or disrupt the website experience.
These 3 metrics help Google paint a picture of the user experience your website is offering which then dictates how they rate your site when serving the results to searches.
