While every project is different, my process always tends to be the same. Once your contract is signed and returned to me and your retainer is paid, I will give you a Start Date – this Start Date is Very Important. The week of that date (usually a Monday) is Your Week – your project is my #1 top priority that week (for larger projects, for an additional 1-2 weeks following as well). If you are not ready for me on your start date, precious You Time is wasted. Your project may run into the following weeks, when someone else is my #1 priority, which means that your site will not get done as quickly, and specific deadlines for your project may no longer be able to be met. Depending on my schedule and how much is missing, your project may even have to be rescheduled to my next opening.

Here is how the process works:

1. In the weeks preceding your Start Date, you need to be compiling all of your content: text, photos, logo, notes about what you want in the design, everything that you will provide. Some people send me piles of info – others send me just their text and photos; it varies from client to client. Whatever you will provide all needs to be ready by your Start Date and uploaded to a Dropbox that we will create and share with you.
2. On or just before your start date, I pore through everything you have sent me – I read everything, I look at any photos, I do a lot of scribbling on notepads and thinking and sketching etc. I may email you with questions. Then I start to work on a design in Photoshop and/or Illustrator, spending hours taking your text, photos, and whatever else and playing with them, arranging them, adding elements, removing elements, testing different fonts, testing different colors if specific ones haven’t been requested, until I come up with what I believe is a design that complements and cleanly presents and highlights your content and will appeal to your audience.  I usually mockup one or two pages.
3. I will send you that mockup,  you look at it, and you give me your feedback:
   • You love it! It’s a go! or
   • You like it, but there are some things you would like tweaked/done differently – in which case I will make those changes and send it to you again, rinse repeat until you love it or
   • You don’t like it at all and I start over but this time with a much better idea of what you are looking for, at which point hopefully the new design will be a go or just need some tweaking.
4. Once you approve a design, I start building the site on your server, in a directory where no one will see it until you are ready for it to go live. Once I have all of your content in, I will send the site to you to review. You send me back any content revisions you might have, and we go back and forth until you are happy with everything, at which point I can make it live!
5. Once you pay your final invoice, I will give you step-by-step directions for logging in to make edits to your site.

PLEASE NOTE: If you request any design changes after approving the design you will be charged an hourly fee for those changes, as all feedback and requests for design changes should be made before approving the design. Once I begin building the site, changes to the design become much more complicated to do.