Our Process: Wireframes and design

At Mercury Jane Media, when creating a new or refreshed website for your company, we believe in taking the time to do it right. We have an established process that allows us to get to know you, your company, and your brand style to create a beautiful, functional website that is uniquely “you” and gets you leads that help you grow your business! 

Gathering initial information and assets

Before starting work on any project, it's important to have a clear understanding of your business and the value you provide. We begin by sending over a Google Doc with questions about your business, team, competitors, and products or services. This helps us get a better sense of what you offer and what will be most effective for your audience. We also share a Google Drive folder for all of your logo and brand files, photos of you and your team, as well as any other relevant images or files that might be needed for the website. 

If you need any new pictures or videos for your new site, we can provide these for you through our wonderful partners at Heidi Mitchell Photography and the Cassidy Collective. This ensures we have all of the necessary materials on hand before we start designing and you have high-quality, personal options that will enhance your ability to communicate your offering. By taking these initial steps, we can ensure that your project turns out exactly as you envisioned.

Website kickoff call

Once we’ve gathered some initial information about your company, we will schedule a kickoff call with you to discuss the next steps. This meeting can be done via Zoom or in-person and will last about an hour. During the meeting, we will review the information you've provided thus far and begin to create a text document that will serve as an outline for the website. This document will detail what pages the website will have and what information should go on each page. Once the outline is complete, we will begin working on designing and building the website.

Begin wireframing in Figma

When we have a content outline for each page of your website, the next step is to start putting designs together by creating wireframes. Wireframes are essentially blueprints created in Figma, a design program. They are helpful because we can see the layout and get an idea of what will go where for each page and section. Placeholder images and text/copy might be used until we get everything we need. We’ll go through a couple rounds of revisions to ensure we’ve been thoughtful and thorough in creating the most effective flow of information on each page. 

Flesh out content 

Once the wireframes are complete, it's time to start finalizing the content for the site. If we are handling copywriting, our team will get to work on writing your content right away. If you have hired a different company to do the copy, we will work with them to get all of the content we need. If you are providing us with the copy yourself, we’ll make sure we’re on the same page about what is needed and work with you to get the copy incorporated as soon as possible. In all cases, our goal is to gather the content and move on to the next phase of the design process as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

Create low-fidelity mockups in Figma

When we have the content and layout of your website finalized, we'll move on to creating low-fidelity mockups in Figma. This process starts with setting up a color palette and typography styles that match your branding. We'll also insert all of the final images, copy, icons, and logos. Our goal is to create a design that is both visually appealing and easy to navigate. We'll pay attention to the small details, like consistent spacing and styling throughout the site, to ensure that each section flows together seamlessly. We'll also add flourishes to make the design pop!

We start with the homepage and send you a link to review it once we have a solid first draft. Since this is just a static mockup, you can’t click on anything and it’s not responsive on different screen sizes (it’s mocked up for a MacBook laptop screen size). Creating a mockup like this allows us to put together a great visual representation of your site that can easily be changed and tweaked as we discuss what’s working and what isn’t. It is a lot less time-consuming to do this before the site has been built by our developers. 

Once the homepage mockup has been revised and approved, we'll mock up the other pages and send them to you for approval.

Begin the development process

After you've approved the final mockups for your website, our team of developers will take over to build the site. Before they start, our designers will meet with the developers to go over all of the design specifications and make sure they have everything they need. Throughout the development process, the designers and developers will work together closely to provide clarification as needed. This way, we can ensure your website is everything you were hoping it would be (and more)!