We aren’t proclaiming that our process is the easiest and most efficient. It just works for us and gets the results we and our clients expect. After each project we go back through and examine where we could speed things up, elaborate on certain areas, and continue to refine our process. Below you’ll find a very general path we take when starting out with a new project. Like with everything we do, we’d love to hear how others go about their projects and what works best. Again, this is just a basic summary of the process we take.

Gathering Company and Competitive Information

Every project needs to start off with some research. We put together a general profile of the client, what products or services they offer, their location, target market, and other objectives they wish to accomplish. From that we look over some local, regional, and national competitors to see how open the online market is. This phase helps us get a better understanding of the project, learning about the company, understanding their brand and also viewing their competition. We believe this phase is the key stage to any successful web project. It’s crucial to gather as much information as possible here. There isn’t anything about the client that you shouldn’t know to help get a better understanding of them.

Wire frames and Sketching

At this point we start wireframing out the relevant content for the site. We figure out which pages and categories will be needed. Plus we need to structure everything to make it quick and easy for the user to find. We put together some very basic wireframes to illustrate how the page will be laid out. These will include, navigation, headline blocks, divided content based on relevance, advertising sections, etc. After the wire frames are finalized we begin sketching out ideas for the actual look and design of the site. The sketches are more for internal use, and help our designers and developers work out logistics before actually beginning with the design phase. This entire phase is pretty quick, as we are just putting together some rough draft ideas, but really helps in speeding up the actual design portion of the project. We suggest printing out reams of the 960 Grid System PDFs for this phase.

Design and Revisions

Taking the sketches we put together, we start to throw everything into Photoshop. A lot of people think it’s as simple as adding a few drop shadows, applying a couple of filters, and make everything have a reflection. Although that might work for “some” people, we want to make sure the sites we create are unique, and don’t fall into the category of “ordinary.” Each site is crafted with pixel perfection, focused on content layout and ease of use. We usually put together a couple of versions for internal review before presenting anything to the client. This way we can usually get through most of the back and forth changes from the client and give them something that will hopefully have minimal revisions. There isn’t such a thing as a perfect design on the first try, so once the design is presented to the client we iron out the kinks. We understand that your website is a direct reflection of your company.

Code Development

The design is finalized. Now we toss the design over to our code monkeys to slice up and piece together using Matrix like code. Each site is built with standard XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This will help the site run faster, perform better, and be more accessible to a wider range of users. Usually at this point we put everything together into a WordPress theme. WordPress is a great tool to use for content management. It makes it much easier for us to maintain and update after the site has launched, and we can also hand it off to the client and be confident that the overall structure and design won’t be compromised. With all of the plugins and continued support we have just found that WordPress works best for the projects we work on. There are plenty of other great content management systems out there, but we’re just most comfortable working with WordPress.

Just as we’re about the wrap up with the final coding touches, we begin to put the site through a series of usability testing. We put the site in front of a remote group of users and have them accomplish certain tasks. These testing scenarios will help us better adapt the site to a common user and help fix any kinks that might be lingering.

Beyond Site Launch

Once the coding is in place and everything is ticking and tocking like it should, we continue to guide the site. There’s a lot to be done after all of the coding and the final launch of the site. There needs to be steady additions to the site, building up links and a reputation, cleaning up keyword phrases, submitting sitemaps, combing through new questions and comments, etc. Just because you have this shiny brand new site, doesn’t mean people are just going to show up, there needs to be continued growth and lasting attention to your site to help it achieve it’s overall potential.

So that is our brief process. If you’d like some more details about any area please contact us. We always love the fan mail.