Blue Utopia Blog

How to approach building a website

Sat, Feb 4, 2017 - 11:23 PM

When we talk about putting up a website, it’s helpful to break that down into a couple of distinct phases.

The first phase is your overall approach. The easiest way to think about this is how custom you want to be. Think about how demanding you want to be with the look and functions, available resources, and your budget. This will guide your approach and will help determine the CMS platform you go with. By way of example, a common website platform is WordPress (WP). It’s very customizable and powerful and yet affordable. With WP though, you are responsible for all aspects of the technical setup. So do you have webmaster? Do you need this amount of flexibility?

With Blue Utopia, we do all the technical setup for you such as; setting up your site on a hosting server, registering your site with search engines, configuring your DNS, connecting your default pages together, connecting your online donation page, publishing volunteer/signup pages, setting up legal disclaimers, and a lot more.

With Blue Utopia’s website template system, you do give up of flexibility over a custom approach but you save a lot of time and effort. What you essentially start out with is fully functioning website with nearly all the pages you will need that is full of demo (sample) content. This entire setup process is included in the core on-boarding fee.

This brings us to the second part of your website approach (content): how do you want to approach the task of (a) creating and (b) publishing your website content. Your content includes all the items that go onto your website. Textually, that includes your bio, statement of priorities, why you’re running, news articles, list of endorsements, past endorsements, etc but it also includes your logo, photos, and other graphics.

Option 1 is the DIY approach. We’ve already taken the most technical items off your plate. Once you get all your items together, it’s just a matter of publishing them into the Blue Utopia CMS.

Option 2 is outsourcing this whole phase. It’s common for campaigns to just not want to deal with all this. They will hire a consultant or a firm to put all this content together, as well as do some nice graphics design. This is obviously a more expensive path but a good way to get a great-looking website (we don't do custom design here in house but we have partners that we work with).

Option 3 is a blended approach where you do all the writing and asset accumulation and then we will publish everything you send to us into your website. We spend up to 6 hours on graphic design, then optimize the look and feel of the website. (we do this in-house for a fixed fee.)

You can learn more about website setup and design options here