The Website Development Process at 20Twenty Design

Kickoff

Think of kickoff as the project’s meet‑and‑greet and a brainstorming session rolled into one. In this phase, we get to know you and your business and gather information. We align on your goals, style, audiences, features, and timelines. And we make sure expectations are clear from the start.

After our meeting, we create a project timeline and share our website development board with you. This way, you can see all the phases and tasks laid out, and you’ll know what we’re working on at any given time.

What We Do

• Host a discovery meeting to learn your goals and must‑haves
• Review your current site (if you have one)
• Identify decision makers and the approval path
• Draft milestones, target dates, and communication cadence

What We Need From You

• Design and content questionnaires
• Access to existing tools (hosting, domain, analytics) if applicable
• One primary point of contact for efficient approvals

Preliminary Media Files

This isn’t exactly a phase, but more like a checklist of necessary assets for the project. Before design, we assemble your brand toolbox so everything we create looks and sounds like you. Collecting these assets early on saves us time later. It ensures we’re not waiting for files when we move into the design and content writing phases.

What to Send

• Logos (vector: .ai/.eps/.svg), brand guidelines, color values, fonts
• Photography, product shots, headshots, and graphics
• Messaging, brochures, decks, and any must‑use written content

Framework: Research & Strategy

This is the least glamorous phase, but arguably the most crucial part of the process. We analyze, plan, and set the foundation for your website. Essentially, we study your brand and industry in depth. Our team reviews your current online presence and any materials you provided. We want to fully understand who you are before creating anything.

One of the most critical outcomes of this phase is the sitemap. It’s basically a blueprint of all the pages on your website and how they’re organized. We map out the traffic flow to ensure the site’s structure is logical and user-friendly. Once we draft the sitemap, we share it with you for feedback. We want to be sure we didn’t miss anything and you’re happy with the planned pages.

What We Do

• Competitive reports and audience review
• Keyword and topic research to inform site structure and copy
• Define primary user journeys and conversion paths
• Draft sitemap
• Note accessibility and compliance considerations from the start

Deliverables: Research highlights and a proposed sitemap for your approval

Content Writing

In earlier steps, we gathered your raw content and outlined a strategy. Now, we write the actual words on your site. Some designers might use placeholder text, but our development process has no lorem ipsum. Behind the scenes, we write and design at the same time. The words and visuals shape each other, so we create them together.

The writing process is much more structured than what most people initially picture. We use the designs to create content skeletons. These outlines note what belongs where, in what order, and why. Each skeleton includes working headlines, word counts, bullets, and calls to action. Then we flesh it out, section by section, page by page.

But you won’t get a text document when the content is ready to review. We drop the copy straight into the mockup or interactive prototype so you can read it in context. That ensures the design and content work together to deliver a clear message.

What We Do

• Create page‑by‑page outlines based on the sitemap
• Draft copy in your voice with on‑page SEO baked in

• Fact checks and feedback
• Content approvals
• Any required disclaimers or policies

Deliverables: Final, approved copy for every page.

UX/UI Design & Prototyping

This is the part most clients get excited about—where things start feeling real as opposed to abstract concepts. We take all that planning from the previous phases and translate it into static visuals. Basically, we create the look and layout of your website before any code gets written.

To go a step further, we can turn these static designs into an interactive prototype. This means linking the mockups together so you can click around like a live website. It’s a great way to experience the flow from page to page. You’ll be able to see how the navigation works, how a dropdown might feel, or how the homepage leads you to the inner pages. And at the end of prototyping, the design and content are finalized thanks to your review.

You may love the layout of a page but want to try a different photo or realize a call-to-action needs rephrasing. This is the time to let us know. It’s important to remember that you’re not hurting our feelings. Honesty is the best policy. Still, there may be a little push and pull here. After all, we just want to guide you in the right direction. What you like may not be what’s best for users or search engines. We want you to trust us as professionals, but ultimately, the decision is yours.

What We Do

• Wireframes
• High‑fidelity mockups
• Interactive prototype (A clickable experience of the site’s navigation and flow)

Deliverables: Figma links for review, two rounds of refinements, and final approved designs ready for build.

Development & Implementation

Now we get to the technical heavy lifting. This is where our developers translate the approved designs and content into a working website. It’s like constructing a house based on an architect’s drawings.

We begin by setting up a development environment, which is basically a private, test version of your website. It’s not visible to the public, so we can build and experiment freely without worrying about visitors seeing an unfinished product. By the end of this phase, we will have a fully built website on our test server. The design, content, and functionality are all in place. It’s essentially the finished product, but not yet available to the public.

What We Do

• Set up a staging environment
• Front‑end build to match the approved designs
• Back‑end configuration
• Performance best practices
• Accessibility fundamentals
• Content population with real copy and media

Deliverables: Fully functional staging site with your content in place.

Testing

Before any site goes live, it undergoes rigorous testing. Realistically, we test all throughout the development process. We are constantly clicking around, checking links, and ensuring things load correctly. It’s easier to fix issues as we go rather than discover everything later on. But now is the time to verify that everything looks and works as it should.

We click every button, fill out every form, and visit every link to ensure everything works as intended. This means checking that contact forms actually send emails to the right people, confirmation messages appear where they should, and there are no broken links leading to 404 errors. We find a solution before launch if we stumble upon a bug or error.

Once our team is happy with the site, it’s time for your final review on the staging environment. You get to experience the new website as if it’s live. We encourage you to click around every page and test things out. If you find anything that doesn’t look or feel right, let us know and we’ll address it. Typically, revisions are minor by this point, but we want you to be completely satisfied before we go live.

What We Do

• Functionality testing
• Cross‑browser testing
• Responsive and device checks
• Speed tests
• Performance testing

Go Live

This is the technical launch phase, where your website moves from our private staging area to your actual domain. This means transferring all the files, databases, and configurations. We ensure all links, plugins, and settings carry over correctly. If the old site needs to be taken down or backed up, we’ll handle that too. Our goal is a smooth transition with minimal downtime, ideally just a few minutes or none whatsoever.

We usually schedule the launch at the least disruptive time to your business. When the site is live, we quickly but thoroughly check critical functionality. Sometimes, moving from staging to a live environment can introduce unexpected quirks. Essentially, we confirm the launch was a success and that real users are seeing what they’re supposed to. On top of that, we lock in post-launch security measures, like full security monitoring, firewall configuration, and automated daily backups. This means your site is protected and recoverable at all times. We also verify SSL certificates, check site speed and responsiveness, and monitor for any 404s or indexing issues that may pop up after launch.

What We Do

• Domain setup
• DNS updates
• Server deployment
• Post-launch checks to ensure forms, navigation, and integrations behave on the live domain

SEO Development

Just because your site is live doesn’t mean we’re done. Right after launch, we work on SEO to give your website the best possible visibility in search engines. We want Google to notice your new site, index it correctly, and rank it for relevant keywords.

It can be tedious, but we review all the images on your site and ensure each has an alt text description. Alt text is essential for accessibility, giving search engines context about your pictures. Then, we add keyword-rich meta descriptions and titles to each page. Metas are snippets of text that search engines use to understand what a page is about. They often appear in search results as a page’s title and summary.

From here, we connect your site to Google Analytics and Search Console. Google Analytics will start tracking your web visitors and their behavior. Google Search Console lets us monitor the health of your site in Google’s eyes. It also allows us to manually request indexation of the website as a whole and specific pages.

What We Do

• Configure on-page SEO
• Ensure accessibility
• Implement structured data where appropriate

SEO Reporting

Google isn’t the only tool we use to make website performance measurable. We also configure external SEO audit tools to keep an eye on your site’s health. These tools alert us about any SEO issues, like broken links, missing meta tags, or new errors that might pop up over time. Right after launch, we run a comprehensive baseline SEO audit and fix any remaining minor issues.

These metrics are essential for us to monitor website health, but they are also helpful for you. We can create a monthly SEO report highlighting the essentials, like traffic, top pages, queries, and rankings. You can see the progress for yourself, and together, we can make decisions about future content, campaigns, or where to allocate resources. But first, we need to get this report up and running. We connect the data sources we set up in the previous phase (Google Analytics and Search Console), configure the report, and schedule it to hit your inbox every month.

What We Do

• Connect Google Analytics and Search Console
• Submit sitemaps and verify indexing

Launch

At this stage, your website development project is officially complete. However, this isn’t goodbye. We’re here to support your website for the long haul. Once the site is live, we keep a close eye on it. We perform another round of checks now that real users are accessing it. This includes monitoring site uptime and checking features for proper functionality. We also watch for any unexpected behavior over the first few days. If anything comes up, we will address it immediately.

A good website comes from a clear plan, steady progress, and honest communication, not guesswork. Our process is built to cut down on surprises, keep decisions moving, and make timelines predictable. You’ll know what we need, when we need it, and what you’ll get in return at each step. If anything feels unclear, ask. We’ll walk you through it. And if you’re ready to start, our web team is here to help or get your project on the calendar.