We’ve been wanting to put this guide together for a while now, it’s a brief overview of our web design process and what we can do for you and your business. Hopefully this will give you an insight into the website creation process and help you understand what happens next.
Our web design and development process:
Getting to know you
Our very first step is to get to know you, we pride ourselves on having good relationships with all of our clients. We’re going to be working together for a while, so it’s good to be comfortable with each other, open and honest.
Understanding
We’ll want to know all about your industry and business to truly understand what it is you do. We like to know the history, the team and all the little quirks businesses have. The better our understanding from the start, the better we’ll be able to do our job.
Objectives
The next step is to discuss your objectives, we’ll want to know what it is you want your website to do for you. The value of a website is almost zero unless it’s working for you and your business. Here’s an example of a common objective: We want to get enquiries through our website that lead to sales, we’re also thinking about offering special offers to potential clients who subscribe to our mailing list.
Research
Based on your objectives we’ll go ahead and conduct some research.
We’ll look at your target audience.
Who are these people? What do they expect from a company like yours? What’s the common demographic?
We’ll also spend some time researching your competitors.
Who is your competition? Are they doing something your not? What are their weaknesses?
Planning
By this point we’ll have a foundation to work on, with previous research providing a clear path moving forwards. We’ll provide you with a clear scope, detailing what we’ll be doing and when we’ll do it. Identifying your site’s primary structure is key at this stage, this allows us to look at a core element in your website, the navigation. We’ll provide you with a sitemap detailing the navigation and pages in the site.
Concepts
This stage allows us to throw lots of ideas into the mix -Pinterest boards, wireframes, sketches and other visuals. This stage speeds up the design process and produces a more efficient workflow. It allows us to show what we want to do and be on the same page before we’ve even loaded up any design tools.
Designing
This is where the fun begins! We’ll use the information gathered from the previous stages to put something together that’s sure to get you excited. The design process allows us to really flex our creativity, we’ll spend hours upon hours playing with pixels to make something truly special. Once we have put some designs together, we’ll send them over to you for your feedback. At this stage it’s really important that we work together, we welcome your input, and we’ll work on our designs until your absolutely satisfied. Once we are all agreed and happy, we move to development.
Development
Following the previous steps means that the development process can run as smoothly as possible. As with all our websites, we’ll be using the latest web technologies and techniques to ensure your website works across all devices out there and is as fast as can be. We’ll rigorously test the website across all major devices, browsers and previous versions of those browsers to ensure it works correctly for as many people as possible. Once we are all happy, we’ll start planning the launch.
Launching
We like to launch our websites early in the morning to ensure we can monitor it throughout the day, if any issues occur, we’ll be there to fix them and make sure everything is perfect. At this stage it’s nice to show colleagues, friends and family. In the meantime you might want to put together a press release or mail-out ready to send out the next day once we’re sure everything is pixel perfect. At the same time, we’ll be alerting the major search engines of the new website and making sure Google Analytics is setup so we can track who is visiting the website.
Maintaining
Many of our clients choose to retain the maintenance with us for a small monthly fee, we’ll take care of all the technical details of your website, ensuring that everything is running smoothly. If something happens to the website, we’ll fix it. If you have a few questions about how to use the site, we’ll answer them. We’ll be there to help you!
Improving
Once your site is live it’s time to start tracking how your visitors use the site, looking at what’s working well and what’s perhaps not working as well as expected. Gathering useful data from visitors is crucial in understanding how to refine the website to suit your visitors needs. This is an on-going process of refinement, the truth is – a great website always evolves.
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