The Ultimate Website Glow Up: Our Design & Redesign Process and Strategy

Every business needs a website, but not every business has a great website. A great website is like an efficient storefront with a reliable, low-maintenance employee who consistently delivers results. It efficiently communicates information, looks professional, and seamlessly provides goods or services—all while reflecting your brand identity.

At Glow Up, we believe that a great website is built on two pillars: Branding and User Experience (UX). That’s why we focus on crafting websites that not only look stunning, but also provide an intuitive and enjoyable experience for your customers. This also helps build trust and drive conversions.

We also have partnerships with industry experts in business coaching, SEO and Google Ads because we understand the value of collaboration. By working with experts who are passionate about their fields, we ensure our clients receive top-tier support in every aspect of their online marketing. At Glow Up, we’re dedicated to helping your business shine in the digital world.

Step One: Meet with our Business Coach

Starting or running a small business can feel overwhelming—whether you’re just getting started or have been at it for a while. That’s why we offer optional business coaching with Sue Mohr from The Inner Vizion as part of select web design packages. Sue meets you exactly where you are and helps guide you toward where you want to be.

Many business owners launch their ventures out of passion—but passion alone doesn’t always translate into a thriving business. That’s completely normal. Working with Sue before you begin your web design project gives you a significant advantage: it helps you gain clarity around your vision, align your business goals with your personal values, and understand how to position yourself effectively through your website.

Step Two: Material Gathering for Web Design

Whether you are designing a new website or re-designing, take this as an opportunity to organize or reorganize your content. At Glow Up, we provide our clients with a starting point text template and a Google folder to drop all of your media assets into. This is the most crucial step to set your project up for success. Our team can help guide you or even provide re-writing services as part of your package or as a separate service, however, as much as we can help guide, you are the soul of your business, and your input will make a huge impact.

Text Content

In some cases, a business owner may struggle with text content due to a belief that they aren't great writers. If you are comfortable with AI, we highly recommend you try it out. If not, we can help. Typically, there are a few different types of problems you might find yourself facing:

• Too many thoughts and ideas: In this case, try not to stress about structure, or which page this info would be on your website, just write it all down, and organize it later. Once you feel pretty good, let your designer know, and we can organize it with you together.

• Don't know what to write: This is a pretty common situation, and this is why we provide you with the text template. Within the template, you'll see some helpful pointers and articles to help generate ideas. You will also see a section to list any inspirational websites you like. Looking at what your competitors are doing might also help generate more ideas.
  

• I have it all in my head but just can't seem to put it on paper: If this is the case, our team will do a recorded interview with you by asking you some questions. According to your answers, we'll put together the content for you. This is the last resort as it doesn't happen all that often and it usually is a separate service, which will incur an hourly charge.

With your text developed, our designer will read your content thoroughly.

Our main goal is to make sure your text content is:

• Suitable for your target audience: Some business owners struggle to define their target audience, if you do too, that's totally ok. We can help you with that.
  

• Easy to understand: We make sure to understand your content completely so your customers will understand it too. We'll ask questions and help complete your content if we don't understand after reading your draft. We approach it as your first-time customer who is excited to learn about your business and our goal is to make your product or services appeal to as many customers as possible for maximum conversion.
  

• Language consistency: We make sure you are using consistent language when describing similar products or services so your user will not be confused.

  
  

• Answers questions: We took on your project because we believe in what you do. As your one of your biggest fans, we are curious and we want to know as much as possible. We will arrange your content strategically throughout your website. Answering frequently asked questions does give your website the opportunity to generate more traffic. This also helps free up your time, so website viewers can find answers any time they want.

  
  

• Well organized: We make sure to understand the structure of all the information so it can help us with the next steps of web design.

Media Assets

We will share a Google folder with you to store all your content in. Again, organization is key to ensuring efficient communication. A Google folder is just like a folder on your computer. You can create folders within folders as well as rename files. If you have a lot of files, we highly recommend spending some time organizing them, so we don't bother you a lot for clarifications along the way. If you have most of your files on your smartphone, we suggest downloading the Google Drive app so you can upload them directly from your phone. Then, use your computer to organize it. Typically, we'll see a structure like this:

• Current Branding Assets: If we are designing or redesigning your logo and branding, please feel free to upload any sources of inspiration and current assets. We will upload your new assets once we are done.
  

• Photos relevant to your business: For example, team headshots, facility photos, product pictures, etc... Don't worry too much about decorative images as we'll be looking for what's suitable for your business from free stock photo sources. If nothing is suitable, we can look at some paid options. (P.S. They're usually fairly inexpensive.)
  

• Videos: (If you have to host them only through your website). Otherwise, hosting them on YouTube or Vimeo is a great way to improve site loading speed. If you decide to upload them on one of those platforms, just include the link to each video in the text file.

  
  

• PDFs: We usually don't recommended displaying PDFs on websites because they are not SEO or mobile friendly, however, if it's a lead magnet or it actually requires people to download files, we are all about it.

Step Three: Inspiration Gathering

On a big digital whiteboard, we'll look at screenshots of all your inspirations and our findings that we think you'd love. Taking a look at each inspirations in-depth and pooling all great ideas together. At this point, we should also have all your content organized and put together your menu system to make sure your site structure is easy to understand and navigate. In the case of too many items, our team might need to perform mind mapping first, and/or a card sorting exercise.

Step Four: Wireframe Development

What is a wireframe?

A wireframe is a simple, visual blueprint of a website that outlines its structure, layout, and key elements without focusing on design details like colors or images. It serves as a guide to map out where things like menus, buttons, text, and images will go, helping to plan the user experience and functionality. Wireframes are essential for aligning business owners and designers early in a project, ensuring everyone agrees on the framework before moving into detailed design and development.

How is it presented?

After gathering all of your inspiration and understanding the general structure of the website, our designer will create wireframes for all your major pages. This will be added to the same whiteboard where we’ve collaborated so far, bringing everything together in one place. The wireframe serves as a visual blueprint, allowing us to clearly see how the website will function and flow. We encourage your feedback during this stage—it’s the perfect opportunity to collaborate, brainstorm, and even spark new ideas. Once we present the wireframe and refine it based on our discussion, we’ll send you the updated version and await any additional input you may have.

Step Five: Desktop Building & Presentation

Once the wireframes are finalized, our team will begin building the actual website—exciting, right? This step typically takes 1-2 weeks, though larger websites or those requiring custom coding may take a bit longer. Don’t worry—our designer will keep you informed and let you know exactly when the presentation is scheduled. During the development phase, you can sit back, relax, and let us handle the heavy lifting.

At the presentation, we’ll walk you through every page of the website, ensuring everything meets your expectations. Take as much time as you need to provide feedback—your input is essential to making sure the final product is perfect for you.

Step Six: Revision & Testing

Revision Hours

When you signed up with Glow Up, you received a set number of revision hours. These hours begin counting after the presentation and cover both communication and the actual revision work. For about 97% of our clients, only a few hours are needed, but we include extra hours as a buffer, just in case. If your revisions require more time than allotted, any additional hours will be added to your next invoice.

The purpose of revision hours is to maintain balance—since we’ve already spent a considerable amount of time in the planning and design stages, our first draft is typically 95% aligned with your vision. Revision hours help establish boundaries, ensuring our designers are compensated for any significant additional work.

To make the process as smooth as possible, we’ll send you a feedback link where you can leave comments directly on the website, ensuring clear and effective communication.

Testing

It’s important to note that revision hours apply only to aesthetic changes and minor content updates. After the revisions, we’ll move on to testing all functionalities to ensure your website performs flawlessly at launch.

If this is a brand-new website, we’ll set you up with hosting, connect your domain name, and perform additional tests. For redesigns, some testing may need to wait until your domain name is connected. Rest assured, we’ll ensure everything is running smoothly before going live!

Step Seven: Mobile Development

Once the desktop version of your website is finalized, we’ll move on to mobile development—an essential step since 60% or more of users will visit your website on smartphones, compared to 38% on desktops and only 2% on tablets. Keep in mind these numbers can vary depending on your target audience, industry, and location. Glow Up ensures your website is fully responsive across all viewports, delivering a seamless user experience regardless of device.

This phase typically takes about half a week or longer, depending on the complexity of the design. Once mobile development is complete, we’ll send you another feedback link so you can review and request any necessary changes. At this stage, you should have plenty of revision hours left, but if additional work is required, any extra hours will be added to your next invoice.

Step Eight: On-page SEO

What is SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic. It involves optimizing many elements of a website, including content, keywords, metadata, images, and overall site structure, to make it more relevant and appealing to search engine algorithms.

SEO goes hand in hand with user experience (UX). Even if your website ranks number 1 on search engines, poor user experience—such as slow loading speeds, difficult navigation, or irrelevant content—can cause users to leave quickly. This high bounce rate signals to search engines that your website isn’t meeting user expectations, which can lead to lower rankings over time. (High bounce rate simply means that someone discovered your website, clicked the link, stayed on your site for a short period of time, and "bounced" back off your site because your content didn't seem to meet their needs/expectation.)

On the flip side, a website that focuses on both SEO and user experience has a significant advantage. Within a few months to a year, your website can potentially outrank websites that have existed for over a decade because they neglected SEO. By providing valuable content and a seamless experience, search engines are more likely to recognize your website as a reliable resource, rewarding it with better visibility and higher rankings.

What does Glow Up do on SEO?

Since we are so thorough during the initial content phase, you can feel confident that your content is relevant to your target audience, answers the right questions, and encourages visitors to stay on your site and increase the chance of conversions. We are extremely passionate about your businesses long-term success, which is why we offer a strategic keyword research phase. This includes finding keywords that you realistically have the chance to rank for, in time.

Our SEO specialist identifies and implements the use of 5+ major keywords, strategically placing them in the areas where they will have the most impact on your website’s performance. If these changes affect the website’s copy, we’ll reach out to let you know so everything aligns.

If you’ve opted for a package that includes advanced keyword research, our SEO specialist will go even deeper to find keywords with the right search intent, high search volume, and low competition. This will help increase the chance of your website ranking higher and attracting the right traffic. However, it’s important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, and it can take anywhere from a few months to a year for your website to actually rank high in search. This process is largely determined by the search engine algorithms, the industry you're in, the amount of people searching for these terms, and the competition from other websites.

If you’d like to dive deeper into how SEO works check out Abigail's series on How to Increase Organic Website Traffic. She’s an emerging expert in this field and offers a lot of free knowledge through this 4 part, weekly series.

What if my site already has organic traffic, but I need a redesign?

SEO is a critical aspect of your website—after all, what's the point of building a site if no one can find it? At Glow Up, we make sure your content is relevant, concise, and easy to understand, which is a key part of SEO. We’ve also ensured that your website is user-friendly and mobile-responsive—another essential element for success. Now, we’re diving into the technical part, which is the behind-the-scenes work that you won’t necessarily see but it is just as important.

For brand-new websites, this technical piece can be performed after the website is launched—once hosting is set up and the domain is connected. We know how excited you are to start promoting it as soon as possible. For website redesign projects, things can look a little different. If your current website is generating a decent amount of traffic, there are a number of technical things we need to consider before redesigning. Since this process is different each client's site, we can discuss in more detail on our initial calls.

Step Nine: Site Launch and Next Steps!

Congratulations on your new website! 🎉 Now, take a deep breath, kick back, and relax—just kidding! While launching your website is a huge accomplishment, there’s still more work to be done. Again, think of your website as your digital storefront, like having an automated employee providing exceptional service and answering any questions your visitors might have. Just like a real store, your website still needs regular maintenance, ongoing marketing efforts, and possibly some ads to keep it fresh, relevant, and continuously attracting the right audience.

If you want to take a vacation, though, that’s totally okay too! After all, you’re the boss! Another perk of being in charge! But take a moment to celebrate—seriously, you’ve earned it. 😊

At Glow Up, we offer maintenance plans as well as social media marketing, and we can go over all your options when you're ready. As for SEO and ads, we’ve got some great recommendations that we can discuss once you’re all settled. One step at a time!

Again, huge congratulations on completing your project! 🎉