Our Website Design Process
Every website company has a process for getting a website to completion. It is this process that makes it easy for us to complete a project to a high standard and to make the process as simple as possible for our customers. This process is used for both our biggest and smallest projects.
Consultation
To begin each project you, the customer, contact us, and we collect as much information from you about your project as possible. Small projects might just need a few emails over and back or a quick call, and larger projects may need more time to discuss and research. At this stage we are trying to understand what your needs are.
Proposal
After understanding what you are looking for we prepare a quotation for you, and you have time to review this quote and suggest any required changes. The quote becomes our agreement to what work you require, and additional work not outlined in the quote will cost extra to add at a later stage. The proposal contains ideas, suggestions, plans and requirements. It also tells you a little about our company, projects we have completed in the past, and contains testimonials from past clients. Please note the proposal also contains our terms and conditions.
Research & Requirements
After receiving the quote the next step is to pay a deposit, depending on the size of the job the deposit can be 100% or 50% of the total agreed amount. We now send you a questionnaire that requests detailed information required by everyone who will work on your project including our designer, content writer, developer and project manager. The questionnaire is then completed and sent back along with any artwork such as logos, current print media, photos and text to use on the website.
Once this information is received, your project manager will then do some research on your competitor’s websites, the market you wish to sell too and the exact technologies to be used. He may at this point come back with some further ideas and suggestions for you.
Once all this is received and approved by our project manager, we will then schedule a date and time to start the first two steps of the project, which include developing your brand and preparing the text to go on the website. Sometimes at this point, more requirements become apparent and we sometimes need to adjust our original agreed-upon price.
Brand
The first step in any project is for you to send us your logo and copies of current branded items such as business cards, letterheads, flyers, advertisements or we design your branding which will be used across all items from your website to stationery and flyers. We design your branding, pick colours and create you a logo. Once you approve the branding, we begin the next stage which is developing your website.
Content
At the same time as creating your brand or shortly after we will begin looking at the content to be used on the website, you will have supplied the text at this stage or our copywriter will put it together for you. This text is then sent for your approval. It will be laid out in a Word document file, separated by page breaks representing each separate page on your website.
Design
Once you are happy with your branding and the text we plan to use on your website, we begin to design your website in a photo software. This design will be only 2D and not interactive, you will receive it as a plain image and at this stage it is very easy to tweak and to change. Often clients, due to excitement, rush this phase of development and later require changes to the design, though this isn’t the end of the world we have had cases where the new design changes were so much we needed to bill the client for additional hours of work when they could have made these changes at this phase for no extra cost.
Once the design is approved, we both agree this is what you the client require and we go ahead to develop and code this website.
Development
The website developer takes over at this point and begins to build and code your website, while this is happening we place a simple holding page at your domain.
Proofing
Once your website is completed, all the content is loaded onto it and we now send you a secure login so only you can access the website, you can then feel free to browse and test your website.
Amendments
You return to us with any changes that are required to the website, and we implement them (a lot of changes at this point, especially anything that could have been changed during the design process, may incur additional charges).
Deliver
Once you are happy with your website you pay the remaining balance on your account, at this time and only at this time does your website go live on the internet, at this moment you can directly reach your website by typing its domain name into the address bar, please note you are not at this point added to the Google search engine.
Promote
This is our last job at the time your website goes live, and it is to promote your website online, we do this by issuing a press release to certain websites that watch out for new sites, we tell them all about your site, we then add your website to Google, set up Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, and we add your website to ours and to Facebook. All this promotion will usually lead to having your website indexed by Google within 3 working days.
So now you know our website development process, it’s very easy, repetitive for us and easy for you to follow. My best advice to anyone looking to start a new website is to try to have a clear idea about exactly what their requirements are from the very start, this way we can help as best as we can.
