How to work with a graphic design agency to get the best website design

How to work with a graphic design agency to get the best website design
Ready to build a website or add some landing pages to your existing site? It’s a good idea to work with an experienced graphic design agency who is fluent in how to design a website. They’ll guide you through the process of responsive web design to create and launch a successful site. Following is an overview of how to work with a graphic design agency to create or update your website.
What is website design?
Website design and development is a central part of building a strong brand. Web design is the process of creating how your website content will be organized and information about your company will be accessed. It involves creating a site structure (reflected in a site map) and page layouts, using your brand colors, fonts, and images. Graphic designers and copywriters work together to so that the website interface enables a good user experience across various devices. Your website needs to be responsive so it’s accessible, navigation should be intuitive, and transactions have to be seamless.
What’s the difference between web design and web development?
Web development is the coding to build the web design as an interactive experience on a web browser, enabling links within the page. Web developers build the functionality into the static mockup that a web designer provides.
What is web hosting?
Website files must be stored on a web server to be viewable online. So, web hosting is the process of renting or buying space on a server to house your website. Web hosting service providers offer a variety of hosting plans, and we can advise clients on choosing the right hosting plan so websites load quickly and reliably.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page that you point people to from your ads. When users click on a banner or search ad, for example, the ad will link to a landing page. Because it’s where users go, it’s also referred to as a destination page. Landing pages should be strategically designed to convert leads into customers.
How should I identify the right graphic design agency for my web design project?
When choosing an agency, clients consider a mix of capabilities and chemistry. You want to make sure the graphic design agency has the expertise and experience you’re looking for, but you also want to make sure that you have a similar approach to planning, problem solving, and project management. For a website design project to be successful, these skills are just as important as creative services.
Ten questions to ask in choosing an agency include:
- Who will be my primary point of contact, and what is your approach to website design project management?
- Do you provide copywriting, design, and development?
- Which team members will be working on my web design project and what is their experience?
- Do you have experience building a website on my preferred Content Management System (CMS)?
- What is your process for quality assurance and testing?
- Can you recommend a website hosting provider?
- Do you have the capacity to take on the work during the timeframe required to meet our desired launch date?
- Could you share an example of a similar website design project and the creative options that were presented to the client?
- Can you provide references?
- What information do you need from me in order to estimate the project?
What does my graphic design agency need to start web page design or website design?
Before the design process begins, you can help ensure success by arming your graphic design agency or web designer with the following information.
- Identify all stakeholders and involve them from beginning to end. Think through who in your organization should be involved in the project and define what each person’s role will be. Identify people who will provide input, such as technical subject matter experts, as well as those who will be decision makers on content and design. You’ll also want to loop those on the IT side who may be involved in hosting decisions. By including everyone from the get-go through to launch, you’ll have greater buy-in on – and a smoother transition to — the new website design.
- Explain how your current website falls short. In broad terms, what do you need your website to do that’s it’s not doing now, from a content, design, and functionality perspective?
- Does the site design appropriately reflect your brand? Or does it feel outdated?
- Is the information on your website up to date? Or have you introduced new products or services that need to be incorporated into your web design?
- Are website visitors able to find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible? Are the pages organized in a clear, accessible way?
- Is there consistency throughout your site in terms of styling? Or do you need to establish a new set of page templates that reflect your new web design?
- Have you implemented best practices for search engine optimization (SEO)? Do you have an area on the site for fresh content, such as a blog or news area, to help drive organic traffic?
- Do you have clear calls to action (CTAs) at the top and bottom of each page? Are there opportunities for your website visitors to “convert” into a lead by opting in to gated content, or signing up for a demo, or making a purchase?
- Share websites you like and describe which aspects appeal to you. It can be difficult to convey the visual concept you envision. So even if they’re not in your industry, share examples of website designs that you’re drawn to. You may like more movement or less. You may be drawn to a certain style of website navigation. Understanding what aspects of a website user experience you’d like to emulate can be helpful for your creative team of graphic designers and web designers.
- Adopt an audience-first mindset. Describe who uses your website, what they use it for, and how they use it. An audience profile by segment will help determine how you structure your content. Think about your customers’ top “care abouts” and bring those front and center in the site design. Determine how you can get your prospects to the information they are looking for in as few clicks as possible. For example, if you offer training related to a certain product, be sure to include cross-links within the site, so that users aren’t reliant on the top and bottom navigation alone.
- Identify functional and/or technical requirements that should be incorporated. List any technical requirements your website must have such as: CMS, forms, integration with your CRM, payment processing, career integrations, analytics, or user logins. This way, the team can think through the best way to enable those technologies and create a seamless user experience. Once the website launches, will you want ongoing maintenance and support? Or will that be handled in-house?
- Don’t shy away from the nuts and bolts: budget & timeline. When discussing the timeline, consider whether there is a specific date when the website design and website development must be completed by. Are there any specific milestones to consider, such as events, new service launches, new facility openings, etc. Your website design agency should come with stellar project management skills. They should provide a detailed schedule and keep everyone on track with weekly checkpoint meetings to report on progress, gather feedback, and discuss any issues as they arise.Sharing your budget will enable your graphic design agency and web developer to determine the best approach to tackle your objectives. If need be, you could provide a range. And, if you’re looking for hosting, ongoing maintenance and support, or SEO, include the budget for those services as separate.
How does the web design and web development process work?
Armed with the information you provide to your graphic design agency, your web designer can kick off the project. Steps may include:
- A deeper dive: Your web design agency can survey your internal team members and/or customers. The result of the survey should be captured in an easy-to-read document, and any conflicting points of view can be discussed. There should be agreement amongst the stakeholder team in regard to the organization’s personality, any perceptions you’re trying to shift, your core strengths, and your approach to customer service.
- A site map: The site map should clearly delineate the content hierarchy and how website navigation will be arranged. Your website design team should follow industry norms for bucketing content, for ease of use. Once you agree on a site map, it’s go-time: The content and graphic design phase can begin.
- Creative concepts: Your website design agency should present options for you to choose from that map back to your criteria. And from there, it’s all about fine tuning the pages.
- Website development: We often find that developers appreciate specifications for spacing in terms of pixels, font types and sizes, and colors, as well as destination URLs for all links on the web page. This level of detail helps to ensure the development reflects the original vision.
- Testing: When website pages are built in a staging environment, they should be tested to ensure they are functioning properly. A review spreadsheet can be helpful to ensure that text, visuals, links and functionality are all working well on desktop, tablet and mobile views.
- Launch: Once the site on staging is fully tested and ready to go live, the team will need to coordinate DNS changes for the website domain, set up a subdomain for staging and request a security certificate file to set up your SSL.
- Tracking: To ensure that you have the website reporting you need, you’ll want to set up a analytics to measure traffic to your site and see conversions. Google Analytics is a free tool that is commonly used.
We often like to bring the project full circle, by gathering everyone who played a role in bringing the website design to life for a retrospective meeting. It’s a chance to collectively identify successes, challenges, and opportunities for improvement, which can be invaluable to future efforts. And one last word of advice: Take time to celebrate the launch of your new website. Writing, designing, building, and developing a website is no small endeavor and it’s worth recognizing a job well done.
Web design inspiration
Following are three web designs we’ve worked on recently

Swedish Careers website

Bay Shore website

Innovation Outreach website
For more tips, read what one of our resident web design experts has to say.
How to successfully manage creative projects and campaigns

How to successfully manage creative projects and campaigns
5 critical success factors in creative project management
At GA Creative, our role is to serve as an extension of your marketing team – helping you succeed in branding efforts, marketing and advertising campaigns, campaign management, and measurement. While we’re widely known for our outstanding creative solutions and strategies, creative project management is the secret weapon that ensures we deliver large volumes of work, on tight deadlines and on budget.
FIVE CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT SUCCESS FACTORS
Often people ask us how we do it. Here are the five success factors we’ve found are critical to any effective creative or marketing program and some insights we’ve learned along the way.
- Project management controls: Clearly define the project scope, timeline, and budget in a creative brief.
- Stakeholder management plan: Create a plan to identify and agree on roles and responsibilities of stakeholders and decision makers up front.
- Methodology: Establish a project methodology and stick to it.
- Technology: Make sure to identify the project management technology(ies) that the team will be using and ensure the team is familiar in how to use them.
- Creative options: Allow the team to compare creative solutions against the creative brief.
CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONTROLS
As part of any project planning process, when it comes to defining the project scope, timeline, and budget, you need to get it all in writing. Develop a project brief that outlines:
Business goals and key performance metrics
Clarity on your overarching project goals and how you will connect the dots and measure the results of your efforts is essential. It’s powerful at every step along the way to remind the team of the goals and performance metrics to keep these top-of-mind throughout the process. Acknowledging what you’d ideally like to track and measure vs. what you are able to is key. Where possible, troubleshoot how you can improve your campaign data and metrics.
Functional specifications and creative preferences
You know the saying “measure twice, cut once.” You need to design to any functional specifications from the beginning to avoid having to re-do work—which can affect the scope of work, timeline, and budget. Equally important is to have any brand or style guidance. For some clients, this can be very stringent and detailed, whereas others can be quite light. While brand and style guidance can vary, getting preferences from the team is incredibly valuable. It can be tough to get people to articulate their likes and dislikes. We find that for branding and website projects, in particular, it’s helpful to have clients give us a list of some of their favorite brands or websites and why.
Timeline & budget
When developing a project schedule, you need to account for internal agency reviews and client-side reviews. Once a timeline is approved, we get the necessary reviews scheduled on the calendar – this helps us all be accountable while serving as a forcing function to keep things on track. For large-scale projects, this can sometimes be a daily “stand up”—a quick 15-minute check-in to weekly or twice weekly check-in calls.
When the due date and budget aren’t realistic given the scope of work or necessary review cycles on the client side, it requires creativity to determine what we can accomplish in the desired time period and budget. For websites, we often build out a site map and phase in select features, functionality or content. For campaigns, we focus on the lower production assets first which can be turned around more quickly than higher production assets such as video, phasing in the different media as appropriate to get things kicked off as soon as possible.
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT PLAN
In creative project management, the biggest mistake is to only focus on the “three legs of the stool” —the project scope, timeline and budget. People—your stakeholders and decisionmakers—are the fourth leg of the stool when it comes to this project management analogy. It’s important to give them a voice in shaping the goals and criteria to evaluate the strategy and creative. Create a stakeholder management plan to ensure that everyone is in agreement on roles and responsibilities up front. Engage them at critical milestones along the way. Buy-in at every stage leads to better harmony and stronger solutions. While it’s common for new stakeholders or decision makers to step into the process mid-stream, take time to educate them on the process to date and try to bring them along; otherwise, you may find that you have to go back to square one.
Stakeholders and decision makers often have the most challenging schedules. One of the best practices in creative project management is to schedule key meetings on everyone’s calendars up front. We also make it clear that should a key stakeholder or decision maker push out a meeting, there is a domino effect on the rest of the timeline either because the meeting is rescheduled for a later date, or worse, the team decides to forge forward without buy-in and feedback from that individual before moving to the next step. These meetings help serve as a forcing function to keep the project on time.
CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT METHODOLOGY
There are a lot of project management methodologies out there, but two of the most common are Waterfall project management and Agile project management.
Waterfall is considered a traditional project management method that takes a sequential step-by-step approach – where progress cascades from top to bottom. With Waterfall, the goal is broken down into a series of easy, achievable steps built around each milestone, with each milestone decision requiring approval and consensus before moving on. Critical path project management is a variation of the Waterfall methodology and promotes on-time completion by adding time buffers. Both are easy, sequential processes that are simple to understand and manage. And, they are good for teams of stakeholders and decisionmakers who aren’t familiar with some of the more complex methodologies.
Agile project management is a rapid iterative process by which teams collaborate in the creative process, breaking the project down into smaller tasks, with the flexibility to reverse course to address any issues between phases. Initially introduced as a method for software development, Agile project management rotates through product, design, coding, and testing phases through the project and goals and requirements can be changed or modified at any step along the way. Agile works well with creative exploration when the end goal is not clearly defined or where the requirements aren’t fluid.
Often we find that we need to employ a hybrid approach to creative project management. This can sometimes mean that in the beginning of the project, we use Agile methodologies to help define the end goal(s) and requirements. Then, when it comes to execution on a clearly defined goal with requirements, we can take a Waterfall approach to keep things moving.
Whatever methodology you use, it’s critical that the process is understood, respected, and adopted by all involved.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Basecamp, Monday.com, Atlassian products including Trello and Jira, as well as Smartsheet are all great options for creative project management. As with project management methodologies, its critical that the project management tools are adopted by the entire workgroup, stakeholder, and decision-making team and used in the same way for greatest effectiveness.
CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
A well-written creative brief is key to developing creative options that map back to the goals and strategy outlined. When it comes to evaluating creative, it’s important to review the brief and present the concepts in a way that addresses the goals (musts) and the preferences (wants) as well as the rationale behind the solutions. With large teams of reviewers, we like to create a ratings sheet that uses criteria from the brief so that each person can score the different concepts. We tally the results and then discuss the options that rose to the top. This helps us narrow the discussion if there is a clear winner.
PUTTING CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE
Here are just a few examples where the team at GA Creative flexed our project management muscles, turning on a dime to deliver under pressures in terms of time and budget constraints or large stakeholder teams
- For Swedish Health Services, we launched a recruitment media campaign to respond to the need for critical talent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team rolled up our sleeves and dove right in. Having the right media partner and video and sound engineering talent at hand allowed us to accomplish this quickly. GA Creative works closely with Goodway Group to drive digital media campaigns based on sound strategies and research that deliver results.
- For a global B2B software firm, we had to get creative from a project management point of view in order to design, write, build, and launch a lead generation website in just 14 weeks. When the new Chief Revenue Officer at a B2B tech firm said he needed a lead gen website up yesterday, we jumped at the challenge. According to Jeff Welsh, Principal + Creative Services, “To meet the aggressive timeline, the design needed to be flexible enough to allow for just about any type of content. By creating individual content sections on long scrolling pages, we could add or remove sections without affecting the overall design.” Having a stellar developer, willing to take a waterfall approach to building this site was key. Thanks to Bright Spectrum, we were able to pull off this feat and launch the site on the CEO’s birthday with great fanfare.
- For Northwest Kidney Centers, they need a gallery and wall display to correspond with their 50th anniversary and fundraising efforts in just 12 weeks. The Public Relations Director at Northwest Kidney Centers, said, “When we commissioned GA Creative to design museum exhibits, we imposed an unreasonably short deadline so that we could open for our 50th anniversary. They tackled the job with good cheer and came through for us as always.” The gallery and wall display serve to educate financial donors about the history of kidney disease treatment, progress, and the organization’s role in advancing kidney care.
- Designing a 60-page annual report, from zero to final file, in just two weeks. We’ve been helping PACCAR with their annual report for since 1999 and have a fine-tuned process in place. Having an approved design template prior to the availability of content, including financials, enables us to pull this piece together in such a short timeframe year after year.
Creative project management doesn’t have to weigh you down
As part of any process, it’s important to anticipate and prepare to mitigate risks including:
- Scope creep due to large scale deviations in strategy, goals, requirements, or creative direction
- Shifts in the timeline
- Budget restrictions
- Changes to the stakeholder or decision-making team
- Failure to commit to the process – all it takes is one person to knock down the stool!
With the right project management controls, stakeholder management plan, as well as team adoption of project management methodology and technology, you have the basis for a successful creative project. And, giving teams the opportunity to weigh in on creative only furthers your chances for success. While often times decisionmakers and stakeholders don’t have creative backgrounds, they enjoy being part of the process and more importantly, celebrate in the success of the completed project.
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Digital experiences, low prices, and doing good are the top three marketing priorities right now

Digital experiences, low prices, and doing good are the top three marketing priorities right now
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we work remotely, go to school online, and have happy hour via Zoom. It’s no wonder that the most recent edition of The CMO Survey, sponsored by Duke University, Deloitte LLP, and the American Marketing Association, says that “marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic (85 percent).” Digital experiences are just one of the top marketing priorities right now: Consumers are also looking for lower prices and companies that are perceived as doing good.
The demand for deep, digital experiences
Companies and organizations have gotten creative, and digital experiences are all around us. We can shop online using virtual changing rooms to try on everything from tomorrow’s casual work outfit to a wedding dress. Speaking of weddings, we can get married virtually, too, then buy a house after touring it, making an offer, and signing the paperwork online. Trade shows are online. So are career fairs. Summer camps. Seemingly everything.
Figuring out the right digital experiences is a challenge for traditional and digital businesses alike. According to Harvard Business Review, “The reality of how companies are dealing with the crisis and preparing for the recovery tells a very different story, one of pivoting to business models conducive to short-term survival along with long-term resilience and growth.”
It points to Spotify, the global leader in music streaming, which relies on advertising to offset its large number of free users. That became a problem during the pandemic when advertisers cut budgets. “One pivot Spotify made in response was to offer original content, in the form of podcasts. The platform saw artists and users upload more than 150,000 podcasts in just one month, and it has signed exclusive podcast deals with celebrities and started to curate playlists. The shift in strategy means that Spotify could become more of a tastemaker. At long last, the company is doubling down on Netflix’s not-so-secret recipe for success in a business in which copyright owners enjoy healthy margins while pure-play streamers struggle to become profitable.”
The CMO Survey says that “marketers believe that customers’ increased value placed on digital experience will stay high and never return to pre-pandemic levels.” If these experiences are here to stay, reaching customers about them—digitally—is also key.
Now is a good opportunity to consider how to:
- Expand your content library—including video
- Level-up your blogging
- Refine your website or create new landing pages
- Revisit PPC
- Reinvest in email marketing
- Consider new paid social opportunities
Pricing during the pandemic
Low pricing is also of great concern for consumers right now. The CMO Survey reports that “marketers also anticipate that customers will pay more attention to low prices than they have in the past with 18.4 percent citing this as customers’ top priority compared with only 10.4 percent this past February.”
“Many companies observe lower likelihood to buy (67.2 percent) and unwillingness to pay full price (43.3 percent), both of which contributed to the depressed financial performance over the last two months.”
But now may not be the time to drastically cut prices. Says Rafi Mohammed from Culture of Profit on HBR IdeaCast, “A crisis or recession is not the time to panic and slash prices. He says leaders should instead reevaluate their price strategy—or develop one for the first time—to better respond to customers during the slump and keep them when the economy recovers.” Listen to his ideas for how to weather this time here.
Marketing for good
Marketers who participated in The CMO Survey report “greater acknowledgements of companies’ attempts to ‘do good’ (79 percent).” And according to Harvard Business Review, “Consumers are holding brands and companies to a higher standard than previously, favoring those perceived as doing more for society. Companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, whose portfolios include hundreds of brands, have no choice but to pivot in response. Brand loyalty can no longer be taken for granted, and brand repositioning may be necessary in many cases.”
But it has to be authentic in order to build brand loyalty. Bring your brand’s mission and values to the forefront. Share the stories of those working inside your company or organization. Share your goals—and support nonprofits with big goals, too. In author, activist, and entrepreneur Dan Pallotta’s TED Talk, “The way we think about charity is dead wrong,” he says, “The next time you’re looking at a charity, don’t ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams, how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is.”
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