The first thing I'll do is ask you all about your cookie company and build an understanding of what it is you do, how you do it, and why you do it. There's no telling what sort of great content we will come up with just chatting!

Maybe you're trying to gain new followers for your foodstagram? Maybe you're trying to sell your homemade cookies? Or maybe you're trying to prove to your parents that baking cookies is a totally viable career path. (It is.) All those sites revolve around you and your cookies, but each would look and function differently.

Let’s figure out who we’re making this project for. You already like your cookies, so we don’t need to appeal to you. Instead, we’ll create some user personas to figure out the types of people you want to attract and then build a project for them. We’ll make sure to figure out what keeps them from buying cookies, and address all those concerns.

Now I’ll dive into your particular market and do some precedent research. What’s other sites do your audience buy from. What does your business do differently that will make you stand out? What do every other cookie store have on their site that seems to be working? My first guess would be sending a sample cookie in the mail. But that actually seems incredibly unsafe. And that’s why I do research instead of making guesses.

Now that we know who we want on your site and how your particular business appeals to them, we’ll build content around that information. We’ll build out important sections designed to achieve your goals and place them where they will have the greatest impact.

Do you already have a logo? An established brand from your Instagram? Not a problem. I’ll send over design mockups to show how we can carry that across to your new site. Will I not-so-subtly show you suggestions of how we can elevate your existing brand identity? You bet! The process of starting from scratch is a little more intensive and we can talk about that, too.

Now we’re getting into the details. I’ll create mockups of the entre site, laying your brand identity onto the information architecture from 2 steps before. I’ll annoy my friends talking about color gradients. I’ll lose sleep thinking about button animations. There will be time for revisions if things aren’t feeling right. It’s a collaborative process and that’s totally normal. To an extent. At some point I will nudge you to settle on something.  

And finally, I’ll turn those mockups into a live site so you can start achieving the goals we set all those steps ago. I’ll setup some analytics so we can keep track of how things are going. If you want to take over from here, I can show you how things work and we can part ways. Alternatively, I can stick around and help you maintain and make changes to your site. Either way, we’ve become friends and you’ll probably want to send a box of cookies to my house every month. I like chocolate chips.