FAQ - Working with Illustrate Digital

We’re all about creating frustration-free experiences here at Illustrate Digital. And, we know finding the right WordPress agency can take a lot of time and effort.

To help make your life that little bit easier, we’ve put together this FAQ to help you get the answers you’re looking for.

And, if you’d like to talk about anything you read here, please feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to answer any questions or concerns you might have!

What budget sizes are you looking to work with?

We’ve set the minimum thresholds for 2024:

1. From £5,000 for one-off evaluations and UX-only projects
2. From £40,000 for full design and development projects
3. From £80,000 for enterprise-level solutions

The cost of each project will depend on your needs and the scope of your site. For a more exact quote, we recommend that you get in touch.

Ongoing engagements (upon completion of your project or taking care of your existing web experience) start at £2,500 per month.

What type of projects are you looking for?

The projects we work with typically come from 2 starting points:

1. You have an existing site that you’re looking to fix or improve upon
2. You’re looking to build (or rebuild) a brand new site using WordPress

For each of these, we’re looking for long term strategic partnerships where our skills can help you achieve your OKRs and KPIs.

Our team thrives on complex challenges like: integrations, migrations, and multilingual projects, and we’re keen to:

• Help you with user research and finding what makes your audience tick
• Prototyping engaging designs
• Developing and testing new WordPress experiences

If you already have designs, we’re happy to help validate those and get started on development sooner rather than later. And, if you have an in-house or external dev team that you’re already happy with, we’ll happily engage to help design a great user experience ready for you to develop.

Are you an all-in-one solution?

No!

We’re proud to be award-winning specialists in our focus areas: WordPress and User Experience.

We believe that being a specialist agency allows us to provide the best results for our clients and has helped us to remain a top WordPress agency for over 10 years.

We’ve seen how diluting what you offer can negatively impact both the service and the results for clients. We started this agency to focus on delivering exceptional online experiences, and that focus remains at the core of our mission.

What is your typical turnaround time?

A typical website project takes anywhere between 5 and 8 months, depending on the scope. Enterprise-level solutions often extend further, to between 8 and 12 months.

Areas that directly impact the turnaround time include:

• Research
• Stakeholder engagement
• Complexities of integrations and migrations

We use both Waterfall and Agile methodologies to help us manage complex projects to create the shortest turnaround times we can, while maintaining the integrity and quality of the project.

You can also contribute to helping us keep turnaround times lower by keeping channels of communication open and providing feedback quickly.

How do you like to be briefed?

We don’t mind!

We’re happy to jump on a call and talk about what you need, and help you to build a brief from there. Equally, if you already have a written brief outlining your requirements, we can review this.

Do I need a UX audit?

We recommend it!

Our UX audits are a brilliant way to understand if your current website or digital experience is meeting the needs of your users.

Based on our 7 heuristic categories for what we believe makes up the best digital experiences, we’ll audit your site to create a benchmark, audit your closest competitors, and help you understand what to improve to make your experience greater.

The perfect time to audit your existing UX is when you’re considering redesigning and need something data-driven to discuss with your stakeholders, when you’ve just launched something new that hasn’t already been audited before, or periodically (6 or 12 months) after a previous audit.

It’s worth noting that periodic audits are key, because user expectations change over time, and it’s important to keep your experience in top condition as things progress.

Can you work with our internal development team?

Absolutely!

We’re not a selfish agency and we genuinely enjoy working with internal and external teams you already have a relationship with – whether that’s Developers, SEOs, Designers, or Content Teams.

Working with teams is often not only a “nice to have”, but a real necessity for our clients. Each organisation is built slightly differently and it’s important for us to be flexible to the way you work.

We specialise in research, creating great user journeys, and developing highly functional sites. And, we know you have other experts doing a great job elsewhere in your company.

We’re more than happy for other teams to bring their own expertise in SEO, branding, PR, video, because it provides great learning opportunities for everyone involved, and helps us accelerate the impact of the work we do.

How do you qualify projects that are a good fit?

There are a few criteria we use; but at the core of it, we’re focused on relationships. We want to work with people who share similar values and have a growth mindset.

Websites are rarely “one and done” projects. They’re always growing and evolving, and building a relationship that nurtures those needs in a way that aligns with your business, marketing, and operational goals is important to us. This mindset allows us to provide the best experience for you and your end-users.

As our Director of Operations often puts it, “as you grow, we go grow. They’re the best projects for everyone.”

What does your sales process look like?

We always start with a conversation to learn about your current challenges and what you’re looking to create or improve upon going forward.

Once we have a brief, either based on our call or one you’ve created earlier, we’ll offer some ballpark budgets and timelines to help establish if we’re the best fit for each other.

Beyond that, we’ll create a proposal that outlines how we’ll solve your requirements and the services we’d recommend to help achieve your goals.

If you need a presentation to your board or decision making committee, we’ll be happy to get involved to help explain our approach and uncover how our relationship will build upon the great work you’re already doing within your organisation.

How soon can you start a project?

Our lead times are typically around four weeks up to a couple of months. This depends on whether we’re auditing or improving an existing experience, or embarking on building something new with you. 

It’s always worth thinking about your own internal procurement processes and how long this might take. We find this can take from a couple of weeks up to several months, depending on your policies and processes.

We’re not currently using WordPress, can you help us migrate?

Absolutely!

A lot of our clients, particularly those in the enterprise space, have initially migrated from platforms such as Drupal, Sitecore, Webflow, Microsoft Sharepoint, and also from older iterations of WordPress.

When planning a migration to WordPress, we’ll typically audit your existing content, and create a plan to carefully map and migrate your content from your existing platform to WordPress.

As part of our UX planning process, we can help you to figure out which content to keep, merge or lose in the migration process, too.

Do you develop in any platforms other than WordPress?

WordPress is one of the most versatile content management platforms, and there are plenty of reasons it’s the number one most used CMS worldwide. However, we recognise that it’s not ideal for every requirement.

When it comes to developing applications or dashboards, we’ll occasionally look to Laravel as an alternative platform. Whilst less than 10% of our work is done using Laravel, we find it can be a good complimentary platform to your digital infrastructure.

If you’re looking to build a website in other content management platforms such as Drupal, Umbraco or Sitecore, we’re not the agency for you. We’ve chosen to specialise in one platform in order to be amongst the very best worldwide at building solutions using WordPress.

Do you work with “off the shelf” WP themes or templates?

This depends on the project.

If you already have a website with a custom theme, and you’re looking for an expert agency to help you transition to a more customised, frustration-free solution long term, then we’d be happy to help.

However:

For 99.99% of our customers looking to build a new site, we’d avoid off the shelf themes in favour of a custom option.

The reason being that off the shelf themes come with a lot of extra code, 70% or more of which you’ll never use, but goes a long way to slowing down your website and makes customisation challenging for developers. (You can learn more about that in this article here, if you’d like.)

But, we’re not reinventing the wheel here, either.

All of our websites are developed using our tried and tested development framework. One that’s proven to create easy-to-engage front-end experiences, as well as an easy-to-publish content editor. As part of building your new site, we’ll create a custom design based on your brand guidelines. This unique theme will be yours to keep and use as you need, and it’s all aimed at helping you to publish content quickly and consistently.

Do you provide any kind of guarantee?

Yes, we do.

We provide what we call our ‘code guarantee’ which covers every site we build and every line of code we write. We believe in doing things well, and so all of our development work should align with our enhanced, more robust version of the WordPress Coding Standards. It’s this redefined set of standards that we use to benchmark the code we develop and forms the benchmark for our Code Guarantee.

Who owns the websites you develop? / Will I own my website once you’ve built it?

All of our websites are completely custom built, meaning that they’re built uniquely for you. We understand there are few things more frustrating than paying good money for a website only to find out it’s not really yours.

That’s why you’ll own the rights to take, use, and build upon the websites we build. Whilst the CMS platform is owned and licensed by WordPress under the GNU Public License, and the background frameworks and methodologies we use will remain our own background intellectual property, you’ll own what we uniquely create for you, and will be able to take and use as you like.