The Web Design Process

Making a website doesn’t have to be complicated, this is how it works.

1. We have a chat with you about your requirements and what you hope to achieve from your website. It’s important at this stage to fully consider your audience. We can help you ensure that your website will meet their needs. Depending on the scale of the project this can include running focus groups and conducting indepth research, for smaller projects we can use existing statistics and information.

2. We put some figures together about how long the project will take and how much it will cost.

3. We iterate over the above process until we’re both fully confident about what’s required and how much it will take. This forms the requirements document.

4. If your website is more than a simple brochure site, we then build wireframes, so you can see the exact flow of the site and how the functionality will work. We’ll discuss the wireframes with you, and if at this point anything new arises, we go back to step 1 and revise the requirements document. By wireframing the site, any issues or new features that need to be considered come to light early in the process and can be ironed out before any development is done, which makes for a much more efficient (and so cost-effective) build.

5. We then ask you to ‘Sign Off’ the wireframes.

6. Next is the design process - when you can really start to see your website visually for the first time. At this stage though, not a single line of code has been written. Once a design has been ‘Signed Off’, we move on to the ‘Build’.

7. Our developers take the requirements document, any wireframes, and the designs and produce a beautiful looking website. Most often this is done following an MVC pattern, meaning resulting in good database design and a clearly maintainable and expandable code base.

8. We then test the website using a variety of techniques to ensure it does exactly what it’s supposed to do in accordance with the requirements document. We test your site for usability, accessibility and availability. This high level of scrutiny means you can be confident your website is up to the job it was designed for.

9. Once we’re happy the site does exactly what it needs to do, we move the website from the test environment to the live server, and hey presto, your new website is launched.

By keeping a tight control on project management and a keen attention to detail, our projects never get out of control and we deliver all projects on time and to budget. If project requirements change, so will the budget and time required to complete the work, but at all stages of the process we keep our clients fully informed of all costs and always try to think beyond the boundaries of the project using the benefit of our combined years of experience to ensure your website is well thought through and allows you the freedom to grow, adapt and change as your business requirements change in the future.

Contact us today to discuss your project.