Premier Automation
Web Design and Development Proposal

Project Overview

Redesign and develop Premier Automation and PanelShop.com websites. Complete optional brand refresh for Premier Automation.

Process

Discovery:

For this project we would start each phase of the project (brand refresh, Premier Automation website, and PanelShop.com website) with a discovery call including relevant stakeholders. Our team works primarily remotely but we are based in Pittsburgh. We can meet in-person at kickoff if requested.

Major milestones are marked by additional calls to present project progress. We maintain consistent communication with our point of contact between these calls.

Information Architecture:

We study the current sitemap and review against project goals/ current pain points established in discovery. 

• Consult regarding restructuring website pages/url structure and sitemap for improved user experience, SEO, and navigation.
• Organize static and dynamic content pages for a clear hierarchic and relational site structure for crawlers and users.
• Design site navigation and footer.

Design and Development:

Our design process is somewhat unique. We typically start with brainstorming and wireframing on paper. Beyond the wireframe stage, we design and develop simultaneously in Webflow (+ Relume) to produce rapid prototypes that comprise production-ready code. This allows us to move from a high fidelity final mockup to a published project very quickly.

Handoff:

We build component libraries, template pages, and web style guides that empower our clients’ teams to effectively expand and maintain their websites. Once the website is launched on your domain we host a training session with your team (a call for each website in this case). We’ll walk you through making updates to static pages and the CMS, build new pages, publish content, and manage meta data. We will also provide you with how-to-guides for common actions.

We build on Webflow which provides exhaustive courses/resources and utilize Finsweet’s Client-First style system which is very well documented. Both allow us to teach you how to maintain the website effectively and ensure you have sufficient resources after our engagement.

We perform an exhaustive QA audit prior and post launch. For any issues that may be identified thereafter, we provide 1 month of bug fixes from publishing the site.

AI Use

We leverage AI tools built into our tech stack, Relume, Webflow, and Scribe. Our design process and choices are still driven by designers.

• We design wireframes, sitemaps, layouts, and components with Relume, an AI powered web design and component library tool.
• Webflow is our primary design and development tool. They have built out substantial AI features which we utilize to optimize SEO, AEO, GEO, schema and QA auditing. Learn more about Webflow AI tools.
• We use Scribe AI documentation to streamline training and client handoff. Scribe helps our team create auto-generated how-to guides for common website maintenance and content management actions.
  

Our clients enjoy fast and fairly priced services because we have built a solid, consistent design and development process that allows us to move quickly and confidently. We embrace emerging tech, but experience has informed us that established platforms improve the longevity, reliability, and editability of your website.

Note: What we have seen of AI-centric prompt-first building (ex. Claude to Next.js deployed on Vercel) often present accessibility issues that are not acceptable for our studio’s guiding principles.

Recommended Platform

We recommend Webflow. Webflow is an industry leader for B2B marketing sites. It is a no-code development platform that empowers marketing teams to launch campaigns, manage sites, and update content without the need for developer sprints. Unlike website “builders,” Webflow utilizes a graphical user interface that actually edits production-ready code. Enjoy design flexibility with no template or theme constraints. Webflow also offers enterprise-level scalability.

• Webflow enables us to produce fully custom-designed, pixel-perfect websites remarkably fast.
• Its native CMS is powerful and robust for your team to easily manage posts, case studies, team members, products, services, and other SEO-focused content.
• Webflow generates clean semantic HTML that is optimized for search, accessibility, and performance.
• Webflow hosting allows you to manage hosting and editing your site all in one platform, with extraordinary speed and built-in security and features.
  
  • Every site plan automatically includes SSL and TLS
  • Traffic-surge ready
  • Security
    
    •  SOC 2 Type II compliant
    • Global DDoS & Bot protection
    • Automatic form spam filtering
• Webflow is also ideal for marketing teams because it does not rely on third-party plugins for core features (which may be necessary for platforms like Wordpress). Plugins can slow performance, create security vulnerabilities, and require regular updates.

Brand Refresh Approach

We love brand design projects. For brand refreshes we typically break the current brand identity system into 3 components — color, typography, and iconography. Then we focus on cleaning up and fine tuning two of those components while making more substantial changes to the third (if applicable). In our experience this maintains current brand recognition and reputation while making substantial improvements.

Example Brand Refresh:

1. Expanding a color palette for wider use cases, establishing CMYK and Pantone color variants where only RGB may have existed, and ensuring brand colors meet minimum contrast thresholds for legibility at various sizes/mediums.
2. Cleaning up font sizes/weights, letter spacing/kerning, and adding minor flourishes to the logo’s current stock typeface.
3. Making more significant changes to the logo icon to work better on a variety of screens and applications.
   

A brand refresh would inform many of our design choices in the website phase. So we suggest this is taken on first while concurrently working on Information Architecture. Any brand refresh or evolution would include brand style guides. We like to build these out as a live webpage such that it is easiest to maintain a single branding reference and share with employees, contractors, and partners.

Existing Assets:

Referencing the new brand guides and logo files would make updating existing assets easier. With a brand refresh rather than starting from scratch we find that some assets need only updated logos while some require additional attention. We can help build out or edit existing brand assets with a larger brand refresh engagement (see + Brand Application Package in the pricing section).