OUR Web Design Process

A GENERALISED APPROACH

Introduction

In case you’re wondering what creating a new website involves, we’ve summarised our general approach into a 7 step process. We hope that the result of our process is that you will be more satisfied with the outcome and better understand the value in your investment. Of course, every site is different but this will give you the general idea.

The time and effort involved in each stage will depend on the size and scope of the project as well as your budget. Time taken for smaller projects can be quite short, for larger projects, some steps can become projects in themselves.

Discovery

The Discovery phase is all about  information-gathering. It’s important for us to understand something about your business, customers and competition as well as the website’s main purpose i.e. to generate more sales, leads, enquiries and so on.

We would also like to know something about your budget and timescales for the project so that we can scope the work correctly and deliver to realistic deadlines.

We’d also like to understand whether you’ve already have the content (mainly text & images for each page) for the site and whether you’ll need help in creating it.

An important question is who will maintain the site? Once the site is complete, do you want to change the pages yourselves or would you prefer us to do that on your behalf? If you prefer to make updates yourself, we can plan some training, if required.

We will also of course be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Planning

Now that we’ve understood your requirements, we can plan the structure of the site and discuss the required pages. We can also then look at the content required for each page and other possible functionality. For example, social media links, contact forms, newsletter signups and so on to achieve the aims of the website.

We will send you a link to 3 sample sites to have a look at in order to agree a style for your website.

Now we know the scope of the work, we can agree a price for developing the site and for hosting, if accepted we will send you the following:

  • A statement of works which defines the work to be done.
  • A contract which sets out our respective responsibilities so that you fully understand what needs to be done to complete your site.

Design

During the design, we will consider how your content will be arranged on each page as agreed in the planning phase. We may mock up some pages or parts of pages so it’s easier to visualise the final result.

We can also discuss colour schemes & typography and arrange for the creation of a logo if required.

Your content should have been submitted at this stage, if not we can use temporary text and images until your content is complete.

Build

Once the design is agreed, major changes are not accepted and therefore we can start to build the site, create the pages, incorporate the colour scheme, place the logo, pages and content, forms and any agreed custom functionality. We will keep you up to date with the progress.

Testing

All website ‘parts’ have been tested individually, the test phase is really to check that the whole site functions together as intended and to ensure a flawless rollout. This includes ensuring that:

  • The site is complete and conforms to the previous phases of the design process.
  • That each page loads in a timely manner.
  • The site displays and performs well on different device types (mobile, tablet and desktop) and modern browsers.
  • That all internal and outbound links working correctly.
  • That all forms are validating and gathering data as intended.

Up to 2 Revisions can be made for minor changes.

Launch

Finally it’s time to launch the site, this really means making the site available on the internet via its domain name (i.e. www.yourname.com), this can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
 

Once live, you can make an announcement via your social media channels, email etc. If the site is new, you may wish to add a link to it to in the footer of your company email templates.

If you are to maintain the site yourselves, full access needs to be handed over to you at this point. We can provide some training if required.

Reviews and Updates

Once your site is live we suggest having regular reviews internally and with us to highlight any required changes and keep the site up to date and consider any further improvements.

If you’ve opted for us to maintain the site, all changes should be requested via email.

Latest Articles