Taking Ownership of Your Website Without Monthly Retainers

We might be putting myself out of some work by saying this, but you don't need to pay an agency a monthly retainer to manage your website for you.

While monthly retainers have been a significant revenue source for our agency throughout its existence—and we do value building long-term relationships—they're often unnecessary. The most successful projects we've been a part of are those where marketing teams are empowered to manage their websites themselves.

When systems are planned and organized from the outset, non-developer team members can make updates, changes, and build new pages with ease. This agility is crucial in today's fast-paced marketing environment.

In this guide, we'll walk you through how to plan and organize your website project using a component-based approach to set your marketing team up for long-term success.

The secret sauce to an effective, scalable website is in adopting this component-based strategy from the start.

1. Strategy & Mindset: Think Long-Term from the Start

The foundation of empowering your marketing team begins with the right strategy and mindset. Approaching your website project with a long-term perspective is key.

Alongside the regular website pages you'd like to implement in the website development process, you need to consider all the marketing levers you might want to pull over the coming year:

Paid Advertising? You'll need tailored landing pages.
Launching New Products? Dedicated product pages are essential.
Releasing Resources? Resource-specific pages that can capture customer details will be invaluable.

Even if these initiatives aren't on your immediate horizon, preparing for them with component systems in mind ensures you're ready to act swiftly when the time comes. This proactive approach saves time and resources down the line.

2. Sitemap (Information Architecture): Plan Your Website's Structure

A well-thought-out sitemap is vital. It serves as the blueprint of your website, outlining the structure and hierarchy of pages.

By carefully planning your sitemap with components in mind, you can ensure that your website is scalable and that new pages can be added seamlessly.

User Journey: When defining the user journey, an agency like ours can help you refine this process, but it's crucial for you to think about how visitors will navigate your site in the long term. Consider future marketing levers and how to design pathways that support those.
Content Grouping: Organize related content together for intuitive navigation, using components that can be reused across multiple pages, like puzzle pieces that fit together to create a cohesive experience. This ensures that the components you create will continue to be valuable and easy to integrate as the site evolves.
Future Growth: Design your sitemap with future flexibility in mind. Plan for components that can be used in multiple places, ensuring your site can grow seamlessly without requiring an overhaul.

Thinking this way from the start will enhance user experience, improve your site's SEO performance, and make your site adaptable for long-term needs.

3. Design System: Establish a Cohesive Visual Language

Creating a design system is about developing a collection of reusable components and guidelines that ensure consistency across your website.

Setting the foundation of strong design system elements at the beginning not only allows you to stay consistent through the component creation process, but it also gives you the flexibility to making site wide adjustments through components and variables in Figma and Webflow. \

This includes:

Typography: Define font styles and sizes for headings, subheadings, and body text.
Color Schemes: Establish primary and secondary color palettes.
UI Elements: Standardize buttons, forms, icons, and other interface elements.

With a solid design system, your marketing team can build new pages that align with your brand without needing a designer for every update.

4. Component System: Build Modular Elements for Flexibility

A component system complements your design system by focusing on building modular, reusable pieces of your website.

These components can range from standard components to highly brand focused sections that are tailored to your goals as an organization. This gives you flexibility, while staying on brand.

Components might include:

Headers and Footers: Standardize these across all pages.
Feature Sections: Create flexible feature sections
Content Blocks: Create templates for text, images, videos.
Social Proof: Testimonials, Case Studies, Logo bars, etc.
Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Design versatile CTAs that can be used in various contexts.

Using a component-based approach allows your team to mix and match elements to create new pages efficiently, maintaining consistency and reducing the need for custom development.\

Super power Bonus

To really empower your team to move quickly, create your design system and components in Figma. Match the color and typography variables, alongside the components and their names, to what you eventually build in Webflow.

Doing this creates a system where you can mock up pages in Figma, work on copy and assets, get approval from stakeholders, and then quickly develop the pages using the matching components in Webflow.

5. Development: Build with Consistency and Scalability in Mind

With your strategy, sitemap, design system, and component system in place, the development phase is all about implementing these components effectively within Webflow.

Focus on building with a consistent class structure, leveraging variables, and incorporating properties directly into components. Setting up typography, color variables, and spacing structure with consistency and scalability in mind is key to making your component system effective.

Developers can focus on:

Consistent Class Structure: Use a standardized class naming convention to keep everything organized and reusable.
Setting Up Variables: Define typography, color, and spacing variables to ensure consistent styling across all components.
Incorporating Properties into Components: Use properties to make components adaptable, making it easy to adjust styles site-wide when needed.

The goal is to create a scalable website that meets your current needs while being flexible enough to grow with your marketing efforts.

6. Label, Organize, and Launch: Prepare for a Smooth Handoff

Once development is complete, it's crucial to:

Label Components Clearly: Make it easy for team members to find and use different elements using an organized naming convention
Organize Components In Groups: Within Webflow you can organize your components in different categories, allowing you to easily grab them. ‍
Organize Assets: Keep images, documents, and other media well-organized within Webflow.
Provide Documentation: Create internal guides or tutorials on how to use the website's component system.

Proper organization and training ensure that your marketing team is comfortable managing the website. With everything in place, you're ready to launch and empower your team to take control.

Conclusion

By investing time and thought into planning and organizing your website project from the start, you empower your marketing team to manage the site effectively. This not only saves on unnecessary retainer fees but also allows for greater agility in your marketing efforts.

Remember, your marketing team should own the website. With the right systems in place, non-developer team members can make updates, implement changes, and build new pages quickly—keeping you ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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Ready to empower your marketing team? If you'd like a system like this set up reach out!