Planning the website and your business.

An unplanned website is one that is going to fail! We follow a strict set of design guidelines, giving us a clear outline of the website before we even start.

Step 1

The initial goal is planning and to generate a solid understanding of what your business is all about.. It involves generating a good understanding of you and your business – what your business goals and dreams are, and how the web can be utilized to help you achieve those goals. To this end, any company printed stock, brochures etc can be a great help.

Certain things to consider are:

• Purpose
  What is the purpose of the site? Do you want to provide information, promote a service, sell a product… ?
• Goals
  What do you hope to accomplish by building this web site? Two of the more common goals are either to make money or share information.
• Target Audience
  Is there a specific group of people that will help you reach your goals? It is helpful to picture the “ideal” person you want to visit your web site. Consider their age, sex or interests – this will later help determine the best design style for your site.
• Content
  What kind of information will the target audience be looking for on your site? Are they looking for specific information, a particular product or service, online ordering…?

Step 2

Using the information gathered from step one, it is time to put together a plan for your web site. This is the point where a site map is developed.

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 web site – aka your customer – must be kept in mind when designing your site. 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 web site, and is the basis for this.

During the planning phase, we will also help you decide what technologies should be implemented. Elements such as interactive forms, ecommerce, flash, etc. are discussed when planning your web site.

Step 3

At this point, it's time for the design to commence. We will build a layered Photoshop PSD file, to the design ideas gained from the previous two steps. This is then emailed to you via email as a .JPG file, basically giving you a hard copy version of what the site will look like. This is subject to unlimited revisions until the "look" is 100% correct.

Step 4

An installation of Joomla, the content management system, is installed and hosted on a temporary server for the duration of the build phase. Whilst actual development of the website is composed on our local machines, copies of the work in progress are placed on this temporary server periodically, so that you can see how work is progressing.