The Web Design Process
At EarlyEdMarketing we break down the web design process into six distinct phases:
Discussion
To ensure that your final website delivers all your needs and fulfills all of your requirements, the initial meeting and/or discussions that we have with you about the proposed website are crucial to our understanding of the purpose of the site and our ability to provide exactly what you need. We will ask you lots of questions - some you will have thought about, and some you may not have. This phase is crucial as it will help us to determine:
Design
At the Design stage we will take all the information that we have gathered from our discussions, and begin to translate that into a new website design. We will define a palette of colours that we will use (from your existing or new branding), and we ill begin to lay key pages out. We will always start with the Home page and then move on to other key pages.
Development
This is when our talented developers go to work to produce all the functionality that we have established that your site needs, and to properly integrate it into the website design.
At this we also consider the proposed structure of the site. The goal is to produce a draft site map.
What is hugely important in web design is taking the end user on a journey - but leading them on that journey. There must be a logical progression to the journey, and along the way we must ensure that the audience is exposed to all the information that our research demonstrates the they will want. It may be that different areas of the site are required for different elements of your target audience, and so giving the user options to go in different directions is important, but the most important thing is to ensure that they make contact with you.
At this stage we will be assisting you with the preparation of content for the website. This may involve creation of new content or re-working of existing marketing materials for web use.
It will should also involve preparation of graphics which may be a mixture of existing graphics and images, or sourcing of new images either commissioned or purchased from stock libraries.
Testing
The first part of testing the new web design is to xxxxxxxxxxx
Now that we live in an age of mobile devices, it is also vital to make sure that the website is fully responsive. In order to do this we will test how each of the pages looks on various mobile devices - smartphones, tablets, small laptops, and of course big desktop screens. We use emulators to check the look and feel of the website at all screen sizes, at all resolutions, and in all browsers.
The next stage is to test all of your links - links between pages, and links to external websites. We have all seen the dreaded 404 error and we want to ensure that none of your users get one. We also ant to make sure that if they do get lost, there is a proper path back to the main website.
Launch
Just prior to the launch of the website, we will either transfer your domain, or make the necessary changes to your DNS at your domain registrar to make sure that the web address points to your new website on the server. Once this is done, we can make the website live, but it may take up to 24 hours for everyone on the internet to see it. This process is called DNS Propagation
Once we have made your website live, we will need to complete a few tasks:
Finally, we can let all your existing clients know the site is live, post on Facebook, Twitter etc.
Post Launch Support
Just after launch, we will arrange to train you how to use the new website, if you wish to manage it yourself. We will also deal with any glitches that you or other visitors to the new website have noticed as soon as possible.
Once your website has been live for a few weeks we will analyse how it is ranking in Google, and look at your Google Analytics data to see if the correct pages are attracting traffic, and if not - why not. We can then look at:
Most importantly, we are here to help long after your site goes live. For some clients, we are effectively part of their marketing team, and we work closely with them to strategise and implement their digital presence. For others, we keep in touch, but they simply contact us periodically to make changes or add functionality to their websites. We have worked with many of our clients for years and do everything that we can to develop our relationships.
