How we work – Developing your website
A successful web design is built around your business goals, the needs of your visitors, and what you’d like your visitors to do. This is the process we follow to achieve a successful website design, build and launch. Unlike some, we don’t leave you at that point, we put processes in place to support you throughout the growth of your online presence.
Project Kick-Off Meeting – Getting To Know Your Business
To build the best website possible for your business, we first need to get to know your business, or you if you’re working solo, what you do. You’re the expert on what you do and who you do it for. Our role is to translate that into words and pictures that bring your expertise to the web. We’ll send you our questionnaire in advance of the meeting so you will have time to prepare and for us to get the crucial information we need. If you have an existing website, we’ll audit what you have and compare this to what you tell us are the good and bad points about it.
Style, Structure and Strategy
Armed with all that we know about your business, your story, and what you like and dislike, we can start to understand how the structure and style of your website will support your business strategy. From this we can start to build an outline of your website. The pages, its content, and the brand and style we will create with you. Colour, typography, images, aesthetic choices are overlaid over user experience, if you already have a style guide we’ll use that. During this phase we generate a site map to work as a blueprint for the overall structure of your site. This allows us to document functionality and establish what your site users will need
Prototyping
We begin to build out your website architecture, and build what we call wireframes. Essentially the skeleton layout of your website. You’ll be able to navigate through your site, interacting with links, menu and forms. You’ll see where the text and images will be placed and get a feel for what we’ll deliver in the final site. You’ll also see how your site will be structured on tablets and mobiles. It’s at this point you as a customer will be in a position to sign-off the design before we go ahead and build the final site.
Web Design and build
Taking the prototype wireframes and style guide, your content and images we now get underway and develop the site. We will provide you with a link to the work in progress so you can see what we’re working on real time. We migrate your existing website content at this stage if you have it.
Content & Quality Assurance
In this stage we fine tune the site and make sure all of your content is in place by taking it through a thorough QA process, and squash any bugs as they come up, we start to create the list of items to close off before launch, which of course we deliver to you at regular intervals.
Training
This is the most exciting part of the project – handing over control and empowering you with what you need to know to maintain your site. We take a great deal of care in doing this as we want to ensure you have a smooth, unencumbered and gratifying experience.
Site Launch
Now that the content is in and the site has been signed off by you, we create a launch plan to archive your old site and release your shiny new one to the public. We ensure analytics are in place and that your site is submitted to the appropriate search engines so it’s ready to work for your business.
Digital Strategy and the future
Using the website as a central content hub, we put a maintenance and support programme in place, give you support on a monthly basis, and help you with any questions. We can leave you and your marketing team to drive the content, or we can begin the ongoing process of creating new targeted content and supporting it with SEO and Social Media techniques on your behalf. With a constant and consistent effort your website will create a platform for your customers to engage with, and create a positive impact on your business.