What happens next?

Getting a new website isn’t something that you do every day, so you may be a little unsure of the process involved. We’ve put together a bit of guidance on how we work with you to complete your project on time.

  • Planning
  • >
  • Design
  • >
  • Build
  • >
  • Test
  • >
  • Live
  • >
  • Maintain

Planning

Planning is key.

Get this bit right, and everything else falls into place. That’s why we like to make sure we’re all singing from the same song sheet, right from that start.

We’ll provide you with a website brief to complete. We know filling in forms can be boring and tedious, but this will help us to pin down your requirements, and really focus on what you want your site to be. Together we’ll create a sitemap, listing all the pages that will be included on your site and where they will appear in the navigation.

You’ll need to provide us with text for each of the pages on your website and any images and video that you want to include. It’s really important that we have your website content up-front, so we can design your site around the amount of content you have. If you’re having trouble with your website text, just say the word, and we’ll give you a hand.

Design

Now for the fun bit.

We’ll put together a homepage design, based on the information that you have supplied in the website brief. We’ll send you a private web link to view your designs. At this stage the designs are presented to you as images, not fully functional websites, so that we can easily tweak the designs until we’ve got it just right.

Once the homepage has been approved, we’ll then design a selection of pages for your site, based on the homepage design. As before, we will send you a private web link to view these pages. Let us know if we need to amend anything, and we’ll update the designs accordingly.

We’ll now ask you for final approval on the website design, before we proceed with building it.

Build it!

Make it work.

We now take your finalised designs and turn them into a fully functioning, responsive website. If you’re having a content management system, we’ll also install it and get things all hooked up. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the same is true of websites. They do take time, but we’ll keep you posted with our progress.

When complete, we’ll upload the site to a testing area for you to view. As part of our build process, we test that the website works on various browsers and platforms. Do take a look at all your text and images on the site. Let us know of any final amends that need to be made.

Testing

Two words: Internet Explorer.

IE is the painful thorn in the side of any Apple loving web designer.

However, a vital part of web design is making sure that a site works in all the major web browsers on the market. This includes Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and *sigh* Internet Explorer 9, 10 and 11. We draw the line at IE7 and 8.

Go live

Go on, press the big red button

We’ll ask you for final approval on the website, so we can put it live. It’s not always as simple as pressing a button, and we often need to move your site to a different server and make some configuration changes.

This can take a little time, and we obviously want to make sure there is minimal down-time, especially if you have an old site that needs putting to rest.

We’ll submit your site to all the major search engines, so the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo! know that there is a shiny new website out there for them to look at.

Maintain it

Look after it, it belongs to you.

A news and events or blog section on a site can really show your visitors that your site is current, active and up-to-date, not to mention that your company is still in business! No one needs to see newsletters from 2003 or that your latest ‘Special Offer’ expired 6 months ago.

The management of a website will vary depending on the nature of each site. There are several options available to you, which are explained in more detail in our Services section.

It’s worth thinking about how you are going to maintain your site, right at the start, as it could have an impact on the type of website you decide to have. We’ll discuss all these options with you at the beginning of the project.