Here’s a brief outline of how the beginning of website development projects go. While every project is different, these steps are a constant.
1. Project agreement is signed
When you initiate a development project with you, we’ll send an agreement. Once we receive your signed agreement, we begin to set up the project and schedule it for our team to begin work.
2. Project invoice is sent
You’ll receive your project invoice within 1 business day of signing the agreement. We send one invoice for the entire project, but it may contain a payment schedule. This will match the schedule outlined in the project agreement.
The first payment is due upon receipt.
Occasionally, we’ll send a secondary invoice for a project if scope is added later on in the project (e.g. a client decides they want additional functionality on their site midway through).
3. Set up in the Partner Portal
Once you’ve made the initial payment, you will head over to the Partner Portal to set up your site.
We’ll need to know some basic information about the site and the client to get started. Our portal will walk you through those step and prompt you to sign up for a hosting plan if the site is being built on WordPress.
Wondering why we need to know some of the information we collect about your client? See Why do you ask for my client’s contact information and other details?
For both WordPress and Shopify, you can skip adding the care plan for now and activate it later, when the site launches.
3. Slack channel invitation is received
We create Slack channels for each project to keep conversations organized and so our primary partner channel doesn’t get flooded with messages about one project.
You will receive an invite to the project channel shortly after you add the site in the Partner Portal. This channel will also contain a Slack list that we will populate and manage based on the specifics of your project.
The Slack list will play the part of project management software for the project. Instead of dealing with the confusion of being dropped into your tools or dropping you into ours, we’ve worked out a way to sync our Asana tasks to the Slack list. 🤩
Not only will the list stay up to date with progress we record in our Asana tasks, it’ll allow you to open threads about particular tasks and more!
4. Assets collected in Google Drive
We’ll create a Google Drive folder under our shared Google Workspace account so that we can collect any fonts, images, graphics, or project resources in one place.
We’ll also use this folder to house a Website Guide document for development notes and training materials.
5. Final checks before the project begins in earnest
Our Success Manager will review all notes, files, Figma designs, or conversations we’ve collected up to this point and fill out our project intake document. This ensures that our team has everything we need to start work on the project
The project intake document is part of the Website Guide that we mentioned before.
If we are missing anything or have questions for you, we’ll be in touch via the project Slack channel to coordinate the remaining details. Then it’s full-steam ahead! 🚂