Your website, whipped into shape in a week like a buttercream frosting 🍰

After offering to build a Website in a Week on LinkedIn for my friend Alex, i broke down my process day-by-day on LinkedIn, and received a ton of requests to make this a permanent thing.

It was messy and kind of incomplete on LinkedIn, so i’ve cleaned it up and frosted it real nice.

Today, I’m going to walk you through it step-by-step, day-by-day (PDF is at the end if you want a shareable version!), alongside tools and resources for each step.

Yes, building a website in a week isn’t for everyone, but having a basic knowledge of the process will help you outsource well, fight for internal resources, or if you’re up for it, DIY it yourself. Knowledge is power!

And if there’s no way you could set aside a week for this, you could also make each day a week. It would take ~ 2 months that way, but it would be done.

Some vocab before we get started

I promised no jargon in this newsletter, so here’s a key. 🙂

• Minimum viable brand - your tiny brand cheat sheet that will let you stand out if you don’t have one already. Lots of formats are out there, i recommend your have 3 colors, 1 font, and 3-5 adjectives to describe the brand’s personality. Here’s my guide to building a brand personality.

• VOC - “voice of customer” literally words and phrases your customers have shared with you

• Wireframe - think of this as the hand-drawn version of your website. it shows where the main components are. Lots of ways to build it, i use Figma.

• Styleguide (in Figma/Webflow) - think of this as the color and font guardrails for your site. In most tools, there’s an option to pre-program colors, fonts, and sizes and shapes of things so that everytime you use them they’re uniform. Saves TONS of time tweaking later to set them up before you start.

Some assumptions/disclaimers

• I recommend Figma for wireframing and designing

• I recommend using Webflow for building sites

• I also recommend using a tool called Relume that has beautiful, pre-built components for Webflow that you can copy+paste in.

Relume takes a HUGE amount of the learning curve out of Figma and Webflow, and i have familiarity with all 3 tools.

The best design and development tool is the one you can use! so if neither of those are, then use your favorite

Now let’s get down to business! (and happy Year of the Snake! 🐍)

Day 1 / Week 1: Prep, Plan and Pull resources

• Setup a master project doc with all the steps, timelines, and internal resources needed to do this in a week (aka turn this day-by-day guide into cards in your project management tool)

• Grab inspo of sites you love that have similar vibes, visuals, or clarity of messaging to what you want the end result of your site to be

• Get customer discovery call transcripts

• Review product tutorials and walkthroughs to fully understand the product

• Chat with the founders to understand their vision and goals for the company and the site so you have clear expectations and buy-in. Record it!

Day 02 / Week 2: Get Customer-Centric and Start on Copy

• Read through the company’s best-fit customer demo call transcripts

• Pull out all of the most authentic, descriptive bits around the pain points, benefits, “aha” moments, and any objections or hiccups they have with buying or using the product

• Slot it into your go-to landing page messaging framework so you have reference points for copywriting; make notes on anything you want to re-phrase later

• Update the brand phrases or create a minimum viable brand

Day 03/Week 3: Get Copy to 80% and Get Feedback

• Draft copy from interview notes to match the framework you chose

• Send the copy drafts to the experts in your company on product and your customers who can fill in knowledge gaps

• Setup the styleguide in Figma

• Start building the wireframe based on the copy flow chosen

Tip on how to ask for feedback on your copy

• Ask for a 3-minute walk-through Loom of the copy for their input on

  • phrasing

  • accuracy of information

  • any objections to going live with this copy

• do not send them the editable version so they’d don’t write-ver your copy 😬

• Give 12-24hr deadline for “their first impressions” you don’t need a wikipedia novel, just a spot check to see if you’re going in the right direction

Day 04/Week 4: Finishing Copy and Basic Design

• Make tweaks to the copy based on the feedback Looms

• Finish the wireframe in Figma based on your chosen flow.

• Copy+paste the finished copy into the Figma wireframe

• Send the Figma file off for client/approver approval

Tips for asking for feedback at the copy + design stage

• Ask for a 3 minute loom review of what needs to be changes to get approval to go live with this copy + design.

• Give 12-24hr deadline.

• Reiterate that copy is final after this review. (aka speak now or forever hold your peace!)

Day 05/Week 5: Finalize Design and prep for build

Make any copy or design changes based on the approvers “need this changed” feedback

Tell the team building the site that it’s ready to be built

OR if you are that person, start to setup the Brand Kit in Webflow (takes a minute)

Day 06/Week 6: Build the site

• Copy the design from Figma into Webflow with Relume’s Figma → Webflow system

• Tweak anything that didn’t import over right

• Publish to the staging site, NOT the live site

• List out any outstanding issues on the site that need to be addressed tomorrow/next week

Day 07/Week 7: QA and test the site

• Add cookie banner

• Test if all email flows and form triggers are showing up in your CRM/CDP

• Test all button actions

• Add Google analytics to the page if it’s a new site

• Add 404’s and redirects for any skipped pages

• Make sure the domain is connected

• Publish to your staging site and internal QA

• Send to your outside eye

• Connect to and publish to the main domain! 🥳

There you go! That’s how you can build a website in a week with a sturdy foundation of customer research, messaging frameworks, and good design.

Woo woo! I could talk about websites for dayssssss. There’s a whole bonus issue with stuff that wouldn’t fit into this one. Here’s the link to the full PDF step-by-day workbook on Gumroad. It’s $15, but if you use code WEBSITEISNOTMYJOB50 it’s $1/day (or ~$7).

Up next week: How to choose a CRM that won’t suck.

Cheers!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻