Our Web Design
Process & Strategy

Large or small, new or re-designs, our process revolves around you and your customers.

No one knows the inner workings of your business as well as you do, which is why our process starts with lots of questions. Seriously, lots of questions! And before we even start to think about design elements our first objective is to uncover what type of website you actually need.

We use the term uncover, because we don’t expect everyone to know what options are available. Especially when there are changes and new options almost every week.

There are even fewer in our industry that have the business experience to hypothetically match a site to a business model. A critical connection to make sure there’s a decent Return On Investment in your future.

❝ There are many reasons to have a website for your business. But before you invest in one, you should have an idea of how it’s going to improve your bottom line.❞

– Stephen Jones

Lets Talk About Your Website

It wouldn’t make sense for a mom & pop shop to have a state of the art fully loaded e-commerce website, when all they need to do is tell customers about their weekly in-store promotions and build a list of repeat customers to email once a month. A simple entry level site would fulfil their needs for a fraction of the cost.

There are many reasons to have a website for your business. But before you invest in one, you should have an idea of how it’s going to improve your bottom line.

During our Discovery Process we aim to discover the best way to monetise your website. Because if you’re website isn’t going to make you money – you shouldn’t be investing in one.

Your Business
Our first and most important step before a designing your website is to understand your business in as much detail as possible. What drives your profits, sales process, customer base, repeat business, advertising etc..

We review as much information as possible from online content to printed brochures, even old advertisements if you have them. But its not enough to just know what you offer, we need to understand the WHY behind your decisions. Once we have a clear understanding of your business we can start to plan a website for you.
Planning & Strategy
During the planning phase of your web-design we’re looking to identify content elements and how best to display information to your visitors. These are unique to your business in order to maximize your websites primary and secondary objectives.

We outline a strategy that best meets your requirements based on the business information that currently exists (or will be produced).
Design
If you’ve specified any company colours to use we’ll obviously be able to incorporate them into the colour scheme, but we’ll also get you to sign off on individual style of elements which have been identified in the previous stage. For example how the contact form will look, gallery style and display of photos, blog/article posts, header styles, testimonials …

But our considerations for design go much further than colours and fonts. It’s not enough to to have design skills, you need more!

Usability Design
If you’ve got a good eye, creating a good looking website shouldn’t be a challenge for anyone. Effective design needs to work within your medium and needs to focus on marketing objectives. From the very start we consider usability, mobile friendly responsive designs mean more than adapting screen sizes, users interact differently (there’s no mouse for a start, so things like hover effects don’t perform in the same way).

Technical Design
There’s the technical side of the design – page load times are affected by your on-page content, but also your server. Where is it? is your server close to your intended customers? Can your server handle the intended functionality of your site? All these questions need to be considered during the design phase of your website – not after.

SEO by Design
Most people assume that SEO is something you do to a page after it;s been designed. And that’s how a lot of people do it. But that’s not how we do it. We start to think about SEO before the design process. Starting with your content we develop your site around great SEO principles. Helping create a clear structure of information for your visitors comes first. Then it’s just a case of using the correct mark-up that search engines understand.

Marketing Design
The last piece of our design process comes from over 20 years of Marketing experience. We understand why your building a website in the first place and can help integrate your newest and most powerful marketing tool into your existing sales structure. We’ll help you define goals and objectives for your site and make sure that the final product can deliver.
Development
The planning and design can now be transformed into a functional website. The same attention to details apply during the development process and launch as in the previous stages. Other elements such as interactive features, online forms and shopping carts are also implemented and tested at this stage.
Optimisation
The final part of the process is to fine-tune double check the website. Adding S.E.O. search engine optimisation at individual page level for keywords and descriptions. Script Optimizing and Page Caching to ensure you site loads quickly. We also submit xml sitemaps directly to Google and Bing to ensure all of your pages are indexed quickly and correctly.