OUR WEBSITE DESIGN / BUILD PROCESS

Designing and Building a web site that fits you just right takes a proven process. It involves the knowledge contributed by many individuals, tools for collaboration and design, and the input and ideas of you and your team.

We have developed the process outlined below over many years and hundreds of web site projects.

WEB SITE DESIGN

• Project Planning
  • Develop timelines, milestones, and responsibilities during a kickoff meeting.
• Business Requirements
  • The next step is to learn about your business, your customers and the goals for your web site. During this phase of the project, we gather knowledge from all key stakeholders, and attempt to capture the 'big picture' of what is needed. All needs and requirements of the web site are identified and discussed on a high level.
• Site Map
  • We first create high level flowcharts showing the pages and how they are organized and related to each other.
  • We call this 'information design', and it involves you and your team closely.
• Interface Design
  • Borrowing terms from the movie industry, we create 'storyboards' of key pages in your site.
  • These storyboards show the needed elements in a few interfaces, or pages, and how these elements are related to one another.
• Graphic Design
  • Taking inspiration from your logo, ad materials, or web sites you like, we draft a design that fits your business, customers, and identified goals for the site.
  • Our designers are very adept, and create a 'look and feel' that is perfect for you.
  • This initial design is based on the storybords from the previous step. The design is refined until it is perfect.
• Technology Planning
  • Identify hosting service, and if the site requires advanced functionality (e.g. content management, social networking, online sales or e-commerce, user registration, directories, search etc), we plan frameworks, database server, programming languages.
  • Plan software architecture, e.g. AJAX, Web 2.0, content management system, etc.
  • Select the most appropriate software framework and language, such as ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby On Rails, Java, AJAX, Cold Fusion, SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle, from a wide range of available tools and techniques.
  • Security and backup planning.
  • Our decades of experience give us the skills to implement sophisticated business web sites on the best technology for your needs.

PRODUCTION (DEVELOPMENT)

• Design Rendering
  • Turn your approved graphic design into actual HTML/CSS that will be used in the final site.
  • Full cross browser compliance and testing happens at this stage.
• Implement Content
  • Create pages for all content area.
  • Utilize photography, illustrations, icons and shading to create gorgeous content pages.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Identify key words and phrases that you hope to attract to your web site through organic search.
  • Refine the menus, headers, titles, and content to maximize exposure to these keywords.
• Publish Site For Review
  • At this stage, the web site is beginning to look complete, publish for review.
  • Continue to add and refine content until the site is ready.
• Content Management or Other Programming
  • Drop in content management system or other programming components as required.
  • Demonstrate working system to you for review and approval.
• System Administration Tasks
  • Develop processes and scripts to publish code and data to test and production servers.
  • Plan for all anticipated system-administrative tasks (replicating data, versioning, backups).
• Deploy BETA version of complete web site to test server.
• Perform comprehensive quality assurance.
  • Test to ensure all functions according to plan.
  • Check site in all modern browsers.
• Revise and Debug.
• Release final version to production server.

BENEFITS

The benefits to using a structured and planned approach to web site design and development are many:

• All needs are identified up-front, ensuring that time is not wasted re-writing or re-designing parts of the site.
• A team approach is used so that all key personnel know that their input is valued, and when and how they are able to contribute.
• The end product is best possible web site to support maximum growth and revenue for your business.

Looking for more details about our web sites?

View our portfolio of completed projects

Check out our list of recent projects