Web Site Design Development Process

The following is a typical process we follow when building a new web site for a customer. Details may vary from project to project (i.e. if the project is a custom-designed web site or template-based web site). The development process is broken down into various milestones and customer sign-offs, in particular for custom-designed web sites. This ensures that we've completed everything as promised, and that the customer is pleased with all that has been done for them up until that point.

Consultation Phase:

Initial meeting with customer to determine goals/purpose of site and what content/features will be on site. Will also determine if site will be a custom design or template-based design.
Project Questionnaire is provided to customer to complete. This is an important tool to help us better understand the customer's goals and preferences, and to obtain useful information relevant to their business or organization.
Create site map - visual diagram of site pages and heirarchy - and project proposal. (We will help customer to determine the most logical way of organizing content on their site and provide recommendations for a navigation system.)

Development Phase:

Register domain name, setup hosting (ISP) account, setup FTP directories and email accounts.
If Search Engine Optimization has been chosen, analyze potential keywords to determine the most popular words and phrases. Also, provide customer with "Web Site Optimization Worksheet" for tips on creating optimized web site content - to help improve the site's rankings in the search engines - and assist customer in optimizing their site content.
Design home page layout and design framework for additional site pages.
Once design framework for additional site pages is approved, create remaining site pages and add final site content.

Testing Phase:

Optimize (compress) photos/graphics used on the site for quicker downloading.
Check for spelling errors and broken links. Perform usability tests on pages and forms. Perform any other necessary testing.

Publish Site:

Transfer files from development site to live site, check all pages.
Submit site to various search engines if customer so chooses.

Maintenance Phase:

Train customer on how to maintain their site (i.e. if the Content Managment System feature has been implemented into the site) or maintain the site for the customer as requests are made.
Test the site's forms and external links on a regular basis - can be done by customer.