Boutique Website Design Checklist

These steps below outline the steps to creating and managing your new website. To download a pdf with detailed information on what you need to supply us to commence,

1. Register Your Domain

You can do this online yourself, or you can ask Blossom to take care of this for you.

It's also a really good idea to try to register the simplest name, with the most common suffix for your target market. If you are global, do try to get .com or if you are country specific try to get that suffix (e.g. com.au for Australian or co.uk for the United Kingdom).

Blossom also recommends that you get a few variations (such as yourdomain.com.au and your-domain.com and yourdomains.com etc etc) as well to prevent other unscrupulous individuals from leveraging off all your hard work in site engine optimisation and page ranking with Alexa and Google).

2. Plan Your Website

Blossom recommends to you draw up a diagram, (click to download our basic information site diagram pdf). Start with your index page (home) and work from there. I always try to ensure that all the main pages are accessible from every other page. Read more about planning your website.

3. Website Hosting

Blossom chooses from Digital Pacific or Melbourne IT for our hosting. Everything Digital Pacific uses across the business operations including servers, routers and air conditioners are eco powered. Not only will you be hosting your website on state of the art hardware, you're also showing your commitment to a more sustainable world.

Melbourne IT are a strong and large established hosting and registration company, so if it is high end, top level security you are after this is the best option.

Price is not always a good indicator of quality, but remember, web companies differ hugely, and you want to ensure that your site is safe, secure and stable. Read more about selecting a company for your web hosting.

Market Your Website

How will people know about your site? It's not good enough to build a site and hope someone will come. You need to to draw visitors to your site on a regular basis. If you don't promote your website no-one will see it. There are a number of different ways of advertising your website. Read more about Effective Website Marketing for Boutique Businesses.

Monitor Web Statistics

Your admin panel for your website should ideally include a statistics section, so you can see where your traffic is coming from, keywords, search engines and other sites driving traffic to your site. It's also vital to know entry and exit pages, so you can improve your content if a page is turning off your customers, or one is inspiring them. Information on your traffic is very important.

Maintain your website

A major consideration when building a website is maintenance. Will your site need to be updated daily, weekly, monthly or just occasionally? If you want to write articles regularly apart from your brochure or informational website, consider having a blog as part of your site. You can set one up easily through eblogger, or we can used Wordpress to build you site so you have a simple content management system to keep it up to date.

Many clients are not comfortable with updating a site themselves, so an ongoing web maintenance program is important. Having Blossom effectively maintain your site is an attractive option as it keeps the continuity on the site's design and content, and the company that built the site keeps it up to date and an eye on it. Blossom site updates and maintenance are fair and reasonably priced. We only charge for the work done, and there is no minimum charge.

How to Get Started with Blossom

Accounts and Legal Info

Read and sign contract or proposal (or acknowledge quote and inclusions in email)
Pay deposit (50% of the estimated price)

All Access information

Supply all FTP (file transfer protocol) and website access information, including passwords and user names for hosting and domain registration.
Supply a valid email address and telephone number for all pages to be sent for client perusal.

Text for the website

Page Titles
Subheadings - particular helpful if you want to use image replacement instead of the ordinary web based fonts.
Body Copy - Content - all content that is to go on the site. If you require copy writing, please let us know at the time of the proposal, so we can factor in the cost cost.
Categories List - if you are building store with Blossom and we are creating icons for your categories we need to know all of them from the get-go.
All Contact Details - include and license or registration numbers, including ABN if applicable.
Spelling and grammar checked - this is your responsibility. We are primarily concerned with the function and look of your site, and it is vital that you check all information prior to sending it to us.
A list of comma separated keywords (e.g. beauty, skincare, cosmetics, etc...)
A brief description of each page’s content for meta-descriptions

Logos and images

Please provide all logos and images for the website - preferably in vector (.eps, .ai, .pdf, .svg) format so we can resize them for anything and put them on any background we may need to.
All images are available for use an do not infringe any copyright laws - do not simply pull images off the web without checking with the owner of the images first. This is illegal and unethical. If you need images we can provide stock images at cost, or purchase them on your behalf. You must have written permission to use any images that appear on your website. For information on copyright click here...
A list of images from an image library if you have preferences and specific needs