Information Gathering
This first step is actually the most important one, as it involves a solid understanding of the company it is created for. It involves a good understanding of you – what your business goals and dreams are, and how the web can be utilized to help you achieve those goals.
In this phase, our web design team will start off by asking a lot of questions to help them understand your business and your website needs.
Planning
The site map is a list of all main topic areas of the site, as well as sub-topics, if applicable. This serves as a guide as to what content will be on the site, and is essential to developing a consistent, easy to understand navigational system. The end-user of the website – aka the customer – must be kept in mind when designing the website. These are, after all, the people who will be learning about your service or buying your product. A good user interface creates an easy to navigate website.
During the planning phase, our web design team will also help you decide what technologies should be implemented. Back-ends such as what CMS (content management system) to incorporate, ecommerce shopping carts, etc. are discussed when planning your website.
Design & Content Writing
Target audience is one of the key factors taken into consideration. A site aimed at teenagers, for example, will look much different than one meant for a financial institution. As part of the design phase, it is also important to incorporate elements such as the company logo or colors to help strengthen the identity of your company on the website.
Our web design team will create one or more prototype designs for your website. This is typically a .jpg image of what the final design will look like. Often times you will be sent an email with the mock-ups for your website.
In parallel comes the content creation (writing and compiling), and its role can’t be underestimated. Our team of copywriters, copyeditors and proofreaders will receive the content from you, and manipulate it in many ways (creation of catching headlines, adding calls-to-action, text editing, writing new text, compiling the existing text, etc.)
Then development can begin…
Development
This is typically done by first developing the home page, followed by a “skeleton” for the interior pages. The skeleton serves as a shell (or a template) for the content pages of the website, as it contains the main navigational structure for the website. Once the skeleton has been created, our designers and copywriters will work on distributing the content throughout the site, in the appropriate areas.
Back-ends such as the CMS (content management system), interactive contact forms, or ecommerce shopping carts are implemented and made functional during this phase, as well.
This entire time, our team will continue to make the in-progress website available to you (the customer) for viewing, so that you can suggest any additional changes or corrections you would like to have done.
This is tested in the next phase…
Testing & Delivery
They will test things such as the complete functionality of scripts, forms, apis, as well as last testing for last minute compatibility issues (viewing differences between different web browsers on multiple devices), ensuring that your website is optimized to be viewed properly in the most recent browser versions, on any operating system and on any device (desktop, laptop, tablets and smartphones).
As part of testing, our team will double check to be sure that all of the code written for your website validates. A valid code means that your site meets the current web development standards.
Once we receive the final approval from your end, it is time to deliver the site. Once the hosting space and the domain name are configured, and the website files uploaded to the server, the site will be put through one last run-through. This is just precautionary, to confirm that all files have been uploaded correctly, and that the site continues to be fully functional.
This marks the official launch of your website, as it is now viewable and accessible to the public.
Maintenance
From updating the content on your website, to applying regular security fixes and patches to the website's CMS (content management system) and plugins, to even performing scheduled backups for your website's databases and files.
We offer maintenance packages at reduced and very affordable rates, based on how often you anticipate making changes or additions to your website.
