Mock-up and design

This is the first step in obtaining your site. During execution, you will receive static images (as in, jpg's) so you can see how it will look like. These are known as mock-ups. At the end, there will be an editable image with all the graphic elements that your site will have. You can stop here (and have your editable image to play around with), or continue to the next step.

Slicing and coding

The editable image from the previous step will get broken into smaller pieces ("sliced") that can now be used for the coding of the web pages. The coding part is made by putting together HTML (well, in the meantime this evolved to XHTML, but this is just geek-talk), CSS and JavaScript, to make that initial static image into a semi-functional web site. The result of this step is one or more non-functional web pages that many of us nerds call "template". If you so wish, I can deliver you the complete template after this step, to implement by yourself, or proceed to the third step.

Implementation and deployment

Fancy names for one simple operation: filling that "template" with your content and putting it online, so that everyone can see. If you are, or will be using a content manager (called CMS) like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, TypoLight - there are many, I've only named some of the biggest, then there's an intermediate step of creating a second template, coded specially for that CMS. After this step you are, hopefully, a happy customer. And I'm a happy (as in, paid) designer.

OK, some other small steps

I can also help you find a domain name and register it, find a good host (server) for your site and help you upload your files to it. Also, post-deployment fixes/changes will be offered if you need them. Or something else that I can't remember right now, but can discuss in the contract negotiation.