Our Web Design Process

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

There are five key steps in our web-design process but by far the most important is the first. No one knows the inner workings of your business as well as you do, which is why our process starts with lots of questions. We want to find what you do, why you do it, how you do it. Most importantly the reasons your customers should bypass your competition.

We ask the same questions that your customers probably ask time and time again. To you, the answers might be obvious but to a first time customer, with no idea how great your business is, it’s all news to them. Providing useful information early on to visitors helps build trust and saves your staff from having to answer the same questions over and over again.

To avoid the TLDR (too long didn’t read) pitfall, we group and organise the most relevant information into bite-size chunks, allowing visitors to quickly understand the big-picture overview of your business and then easily find more information on the service or product they are interested in.

Our process allows us a great deal of flexibility because the decisions we make during each step of your web design are constantly fine tuned.

Most of our clients don’t have a preconceived idea of what they want the end product to look like, which is normal. But they all know what they want their website to do and we make it happen!

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
During the planning phase of your web-design we’re looking to identify content elements and how best to display your company 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.