Our Website Design Process
When it comes to website design, we believe that design and business go hand-in-hand. The most successful websites are ones that implement optimized design and user interface techniques with the purpose of driving visitors to take actions that help grow your business.
The following is our website and application design and development process.
PLANNING
The initial phase of project development is planning. During this phase we will meet with you and your team to discuss and identify your targeted business objectives and develop the strategies to be used to reach those objectives. Deliverables are often technical specifications, sitemap, and related information architecture documents.
WIRE-FRAMING
Once your website planning is complete, we oftentimes develop your website or application user interface (UI) layout, highlighting your business objectives in a way that’s easy to navigate for all users and drives them to take the actions you want them to take. The wire-frame is a very rough black and white graphical outline of your website layout.
STORYBOARDING
Once your wire-frames are complete, we use them to create custom, brand-centric page or app designs that are clean, clear, and based on ease-of-use best practices. Storyboards are fully completed graphical representations of what you finished website or application will look like to a typical user.
DEVELOPMENT
The next phase is usually development, also known as “coding“. During this stage, we translate your storyboards into cross-browser compliant, cross-platform friendly, clean, and fast loading code. This first step is often referring to as “front-end development”. We then integrate the code-base into your selected content management system (CMS) or ecommerce system. Some more popular examples of these systems include WordPress, Drupal, and Magento. Other times, we may be building a database-driven custom application, which requires further informational architecture implementation. This step is referred to “back-end development” and includes integration of databases and server-side scripting languages.
CONTENT MIGRATION & DATA ENTRY
Once the Development phase is complete, we ensure all your website content is entered and/or product inventory is added to your new website and formatted properly. If we are building a new website, then sometimes this stage requires copywriting based on the sitemap and planning documents.
QA TESTING
The final step within the website or application development process is Quality Assurance Testing. During this phase, we test your website or application to ensure proper rendering and functionality in all major browsers and devices. Most of our projects include cross-browser compliance, which means consistent rendering within IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10, afari, Firefox, and Chrome web browsers. Many of our projects also include tablet and mobile optimization and will be tested on multiple devices to ensure a consistent and easy-to-use experience for all users, regardless of device.
LAUNCH
Once testing is complete and you have signed off on the QA Testing phase, we launch your website or application. The steps involved with the launch phase vary from project to project and can last anywhere from a few hours to a week or more. Once launched, we run one more phase of testing to ensure that any remaining or new bugs are detected and resolved.
ADVERTISING
Once your project is launched, we work with you to develop traffic-building strategies to ensure a consistent flow or users visit your website or application. This may include search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising (PPC), blogging, press releases, and more. Although this phase is optional, most of our clients opt to invest part of their budget towards traffic generation.
MAINTENANCE
Should you need ongoing website maintenance, we maintain your website on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis as you require. This may mean keeping content and/or your pages current and updated, managing specials/deals, maintaining products, copywriting, or general house-cleaning.
COMMUNICATION
Throughout this entire process, we strive to provide AWESOME customer service and quick, smart response times.
