Secondary Site Proposal

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about your website. The proposal should give you an overview of our process, timeline, budget, and scope of work for a secondary site launched using Cultivate Go.

Cultivate Go is a redesign launch process using a personalized Pro or VIP theme. We start with your existing Pro/VIP theme and we personalize with your secondary site’s logo, brand colors, and typography—and then we set it up on your staging environment and launch your site within 1 week.

Cultivate Go is not a custom theme design service. Those are Cultivate Pro and Cultivate VIP. This is more like the site launch process we completed at the end of your Pro/VIP project. When the staging site is ready for review, you should quickly review and make any content changes necessary (ex: tweak homepage and recipe index). Changes to the design or functionality of your theme is outside the scope of Cultivate Go, and can only be done after site launch.

Since your Cultivate Go theme is built by starting with your existing Pro or VIP theme, you’ll have the exact same features, functionality, and support as your primary site.

If you’d like additional custom blocks, more key pages, or other modifications to address any specific out-of-scope needs you may have, we can easily add them through CultivateWP Support after we’ve launched the theme at our standard hourly rate.

If our proposal is agreeable, please complete the form at the bottom of this page. After signing, we’ll create a design mockup of your existing Pro theme using the secondary site’s logo, colors, and typography.

— Bill & Duane

What’s Included

We keep the scope of a Cultivate Go project tight to ensure a quick turnaround at the lowest possible cost. The scope-of-work is:

  • Mockup of your existing Pro theme with the following customizations:
    • Theme colors updated to match your secondary site’s brand and tested for accessibility color contrast
    • Typography customization – selection of either system fonts or a custom Google font for headings, paragraphs, and interface elements
    • Your logo added to the header and footer, sized and spaced appropriately
    • Selection of desired image aspect ratio for post listings (ex: tall, wide, or square)
  • On design approval, you can select your desired launch date for our White Glove Site Launch, which includes:
    • Configuration of your Homepage and Recipe Index according to SEO best practices and our research of your best performing content
    • Plugin Audit to reduce unnecessary plugins and optimize remaining plugins.
    • Inclusion of our private plugins Cultivate Category Pages and Cultivate Video Pages.

What’s Not Included

Cultivate Go is designed to rapidly deliver a semi-custom branded theme at the lowest possible cost. In order to stay on track with the rapid delivery timeline while respecting your content freeze, we must limit the scope of modifications. While we will do everything in the What’s Included section describing the scope-of-work, we are unable to perform the following out-of-scope changes during the design and development phases of your new Cultivate Go theme:

  • Branding — Cultivate Go is a theme design service, so branding (logo and colors) are outside the scope of the project. We have a variety of branding options available, or you can work with an outside company for branding, or we can retain your existing logo and colors.
  • SEO — Cultivate Go is based on sound SEO expert advice, but we are designers and developers, not SEO experts. For SEO guidance relating to your particular site, we highly recommend speaking with an SEO expert. 99% of our clients see no negative SEO impact from a redesign, but we of course cannot guarantee any particular SEO outcome.
  • Content Modifications — As the subject matter expert, you will need to make any changes you desire to content and/or content structure. If you require assistance with content or content structure, please consult a content strategist. We do not recommend making large content changes to your site during the redesign process. Content restructuring should occur either before or after the redesign process.
  • Element modifications — Cultivate Go elements and blocks are pre-defined by the theme you select. That means you choose an existing theme, we apply your brand colors and fonts, and the application is inherited by the theme. We can modify the styling and functionality of individual blocks and elements through CultivateWP Support after we’ve launched the theme at our standard hourly rate.
  • Custom blocks — Your Cultivate Go theme includes all the custom blocks found in your Pro theme. If you would like additional blocks for this site, or modifications of those blocks, this can be completed as hourly support after site launch.
  • Additional Key Pages — Cultivate Go includes 6 key pages1. If you would like additional key page designs—for example a Cookbook page, or an affiliate links shop page, or an Instagram link-in-bio page, or a unique single post style for a separate blog category—we can do so through CultivateWP Support after we’ve launched the theme at our standard hourly rate.
  • Additional Cultivate Category Pages — Cultivate Go includes one (1) example Cultivate Category Page. You may convert any of your categories to Cultivate Category Pages yourself in order to curate content on those categories. You can do after development, prior to site launch, or alternatively you can do so anytime after site launch.
  • Technical debt — Cultivate Go includes solving normal technical issues related to changing a theme, but custom development time required to solve unique technical problems introduced by your previous theme are outside the scope of the project. If you have such issues we will let you know, and if you wish we can solve the problems at our standard hourly rate.

How Long it Takes

As a rapid-delivery process, we’ll build your Cultivate Go theme in just 1 week.

After this proposal is signed, we will apply your branding to your selected themes and send it to you for review. Once you select a theme, we’ll schedule a start date, and the project will take one week from that start date:

Day 1: Theme Build Our development team is hard at work on your new semi-custom theme.

Day 2: Staging Setup You’ll receive your semi-custom theme for review on your staging environment by end-of-day.

Day 3: Testing & Content Setup You will review and test the theme on your staging environment. You can also customize the content for your Homepage and Recipe Index, Sidebar, and other key areas of the site.

Day 4: Approval Once you approve the site—preferably in the morning—and the invoice has been paid, we’ll launch the site.

Content Freeze

Given the quick turnaround on a Cultivate Go project, we will institute a content freeze on your live site at the start of development. Do not create new posts or edit existing posts on the live site.

Once we send the staging site to you for review, you can create and edit content on the staging site to get it ready for launch. Once you approve the staging site, we’ll push the staging site live, replacing your current live site.

Budget

Fees to create your website with Cultivate Go will be $5,000, based on the scope of work, deliverables, and timeline outlined in this proposal.

This invoice must be paid in full prior to site launch.

Out of scope work will be completed through CultivateWP Support at our standard rate of $250/hr, and invoiced at the end of the month.

Hosting Requirements

Please ensure your host provides a staging environment where we can build and test the new theme. Most high quality hosts include a staging environment.

When it is time to launch the site, we prefer direct deployments from staging to production (more information). If your host does not offer this, we can manually deploy directly on the live site (more information).

Our recommended hosts are BigScoots, WPEngine, Rocket.net and WPOpt. We find that our clients are most successful when using one of these hosts, and if you plan to move, we recommend migrating prior to development starting.

BigScoots will give you 3 months for $1 on any size plan. Simply go to their live chat and say “I’m a CultivateWP client and would like to migrate my site to BigScoots.”

Items We Need

Prior to starting development, we will need the following:

  • Please add us as a WordPress user with “administrator” role. Please use “[email protected]” as the email and “cultivatewp” as the username.
  • If you’re hosted with BigScoots, please add Bill as a collaborator.
  • If you’re hosted elsewhere, please:

Proposal Acceptance

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