…and providing you with the best website

In order to make the website design and development process as smooth as possible, it’s important for us to work together and understand each others requirements.

One of the most common failures in the development process is when a client takes a liking to someone else’s design and tells us ‘I want one like theirs’. Before you consider the design ideas, we need you to understand your objectives for what you want your website to achieve, so that we can understand what we need to do in order to build your website.

We’ve illustrated a five step guide below and hopefully these will give you a better idea of what our website design and development process involves.

1. Background

Before you decide to contact us (or anyone else!) have a think about your website and reasons for needing a website. Include:

1. What is the aim of your website; is it to attract sales and sell products online, provide information, company profile, to make more money through advertising, showcasing your services, or all of the above?
2. Who are your customers, clients, web visitors and what do you want them to do as a result of visiting your website?
3. What image do you want to portray about your company? Obviously professional, but if your company prides itself on its personal service, then you’ll require a ‘friendly’ look to your website; if you’re showcasing your villa it’ll be something warm and welcoming to attract reservations, etc.
4. What are the demographics of your customers and visitors? Your website needs to be tailored to appeal to the audience!
5. How often will the site require updating and who will update the site?

When you have a good idea about your objectives then it’s time to plan a few more things. A website is just part of the marketing communication between you and your clients and it’s important to link all of the different methods together:

1. Do you have a company colour scheme and logo?
2. How will your website link with your company letterhead and other materials?
3. Do you have a corporate font?

2. Meeting imp-ressions

Now that you have a good idea about what you want your website to achieve it’s time for us to get together and discuss them. This is your opportunity to brief us on your requirements as well as your company’s background, it’s market, it’s customers and more importantly, who your competitors are.

We’ll also need to discuss:

1. Your timescale
2. Your design ideas on how you’d ideally like the website to look
3. Other websites and why you like them
4. Your corporate image, logo and colour scheme (including fonts etc)
5. Your range of marketing materials
6. Whether you have existing hosting, email and domain registrations
7. Your budget

3. Initial Designs

This is the stage where everything starts to take shape. We’ll normally provide three or four options based on the design ideas and the full specification as we’ll have discussed above.

We will set these up on a test server for you to look at and discuss with your colleagues, family and professional partners to guide us on the changes you’d like to make, and list things that are particularly good about it. This stage is a great way to involve all the staff in the decision making process!

4. Site template

Once we have sign-off of your preferred style and homepage template we will then produce the rest of the site. Normally this will be on our test server so that you can monitor progress.

We’ll keep in regular contact with you to notify you of progress too.

5. Make it Live!

When you are satisfied with the complete layout we’ll then proceed to transfer the site to your live server. If this is a brand new site, we can organise hosting and registration for your domain name.

We’ll also set-up the relevant e-mail accounts for you too.

Post-launch support

When the site goes live it’s not the end of the project! Sometimes this is just the start.

It’s not unusual that you’ll want to request:

1. Get my site registered on the search engines
2. Optimise my site to out-perform my competitors
3. Make small amends and tweeks
4. Update photos and other text

All of the above will be discussed when the site has been launched. Depending on the type of platform you choose you may just require a little training to get the best from your site which will be provided as part of the package! For search engine optimisation work we’ll be able to discuss this and any further development with you.

Feedback

We need to know if we’ve done a good job! Please feel free to contact us or provide a report or recommendation on what things we did very well and areas for improvement. We want you to have the best website that meets your needs. If this isn’t achieved we’ve not delivered on our promises.