This page anticipates questions particular to features offered in my web design proposals. I don’t want to clutter the services selection of the proposal with too many details. Here are some thoughts that may help you understand what’s included in the proposal.
About features included in a web design project
What is WordPress’s new “full-site editor”?
What are categories and archive pages in WordPress?
What goes into headers, footers, calls to action and home page design?
While many developers will merely ask you for the content and paste it into your pages, I’ll be thinking all along about how to structure your site to entice readers and keep them engaged. I’ll apply my book marketing experience to your site design. I consider what information is needed on a particular page and how to best present it. You may have a book’s worth of content ready to sell, but how do you break that up? If someone isn’t ready to buy, what do we offer them to keep them interested? What actions do we want the visitor to take at the bottom of a particular page? These questions and more are included in the design process. It’s not expected that you know precisely what needs to go on every page. I will guide the process.
What’s the difference between “Designed Pages” vs “Plain Pages”?
Making a new WordPress page (or blog post) and dropping in your content is much easier than creating a fully-designed page. What is the distinction? (This isn’t some official terminology, by the way; it’s just shorthand I use for clarity.)
About designed pages
For a fully-designed page, I consider all the questions in the previous section. I may add columns, accordions/tabs, pull quotes, image galleries, forms, timelines, info boxes, custom templates/patterns, embedded videos, page-specific navigation, icons, automated blog post suggestions (bottom of this page), etc. I may opt to include animations or parallax effects. You do not need to request these features for me to add them to a page, considering such options is part of the design process. Images are critical in a fully-designed page. Any images I put on the site will be scaled to the appropriate size, width-adjusted to fit with the text, color-matched to your brand, or cropped to fit the page design. I may add images as backgrounds for banners or to draw attention to special sections.
More designed pages: Grab the Groom, Under Water, Marriage Can Be Murder, LR Services.
About plain pages
However, sometimes you just need a simple page with a bit of text. Plain pages do include the standard header, footer and navigation that is by default on every page of your design. Any site-wide promos or pop-ups would also appear. Though plain pages don’t necessarily include images, if you already have an image that’s suitable to the page, I may add that at no additional cost. Some examples of “Plain Pages”: More Stories, One Mind, Assessing, Book Club Suggestions.
Ultimately it will be my determination if a page needs to be “fully-designed.” I have added the “plain pages” to my proposals to allow for additional pages that would be very easy to add on to the main design. I want to allow for the client to have such pages without feeling like I’ve let them down if some pages are not as fabulous as your Books, Home or Services pages. In most cases we will want to be strategic in thinking about a page’s design so that site visitors get the most out of going to your site.