Our Process
Gathering Information: Purpose, Main Goals, and Target Audience
This stage, the stage of discovering and researching, determines what the subsequent steps will look like. The most important task at this point is to get a clear understanding of your future website purposes, the main goals you wish to achieve, and the target audience you want to attract to your website. We provide a website development questionnaire that helps to develop the best strategy for further project management.
Sports websites are different than corporate websites, and online resources for seniors look different than sites for primarily for children. Different types of websites provide visitors with different functionality, which means that different technologies should be used to achieve our goals. A well described and detailed plan based on this pre-development data protects our customers from spending more later.
Planning: Sitemap and WIRE-FRAME Creation
At this stage of the website development cycle, we’ll create the data that allows the customer to judge how the entire site will look (See below).
The sitemap describes the relationships between the main areas of your website. Such representation helps the customer understand how usable the final product will be. It can show you the “relationships” between the different pages of a website, so you can judge how easy it will be for the end-user to find the required information or service if they start from the main page. The main reason behind sitemap creation is to build a user-friendly and intuitive website.
The sitemap helps you to understand what the internal structure of a website looks like but doesn’t describe the user interface. Before we start to code or even work on a design, we think it’s necessary to get approval from a customer that everything looks great so we can begin the next phase of development. In this case, a wire-frame or mock-up is created. A wire-frame is a visual representation of the user interface that we’re going to create, but it doesn’t contain any design elements such as colors, logos, etc. It only describes the elements that will be added to the page and their location.
iewebdev.com sitemap example
Design: Page Layouts, Review, and Approval Cycle
During the design phase, the website takes shape. All the visual content, such as images, photos, and videos are created at this step. This is where all the information that we gathered through the first phase becomes crucial. The customer and target audience are kept in mind while we work on a design.
The website layout is the result of our work. The primary function of the layout is to represent the information structure, visualize the content, and demonstrate the basic functionality. Layouts contain colors, logos, images and can give a general understanding of the future product.
After that, the customer can review the layout and send feedback. If the client isn’t sure about some aspects of the design, we’ll change the layout and send it back to them. This cycle is repeated until the customer is completely satisfied.
Content Writing and Assembly
Content writing and compiling usually overlaps with other stages of website creation, and its role can’t be underestimated. At this step, it is necessary to put in writing the very essence you’d like to communicate to the audience of your website and add calls-to-action. Content writing also involves the creation of catching headlines, text editing, writing new text, compiling the existing text, etc., which takes time and effort. As a rule, the client is responsible for providing website content ready to migrate to the site. It is better when all website content is provided before or during website coding.
Coding
At this step, we start creating the website itself. Graphic elements that have been designed during the previous stages are used to create an actual website. Usually, the home page is created first, and then all sub-pages are added, according to the website hierarchy that was previously created in the form of a sitemap. CMS (content management system) is implemented at this point.
All static web page elements that were designed during the mock-up and layout creation are created and tested. Then, special features and interactivity are added.
The other important step is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the optimization of website elements ( e.g., title, description, keyword) that can help your site achieve higher rankings in the search engines.
Testing, Review, and Launch
Testing is probably the most routine part of the process. Every single link is tested to make sure that there are no broken links. We check every form, every script, and run spell-checking software to find possible typos. We use W3C code validation to check if your code follows the current web standards. Valid code is necessary, for example, if cross-browser compatibility is crucial for you.
After we check and re-check your website, it’s time to move your website away from the staging environment and into the production environment, where your site will be live. After we’ve deployed the files, we run a final test to be sure that all of your files have been installed correctly and that the website is functioning as expected.
Maintenance: Monitoring and Regular Updating
It’s important to remember is that a website is more of a service than a product. It’s not enough to “deliver” a website to our customers. We always make sure that everything works fine, everybody is satisfied, and are always be prepared to make changes in the case our customer isn’t.
For maintenance, we add your website to a monitoring service that can tell us the precise uptime of the website, and when it goes down. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is also an included premium service that we add to our maintenance schedules, as well as regular Analytics reports.
And, finally, we ensure that your CMS and any plugins you wish to use are kept up to date. Lack of CMS updates and lapsed plugins are often a cause for security risks.
Let’s chat about your website.