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Our web development methodology and approach

With increasingly savvy online users and the growing consumption of online content on multiple devices, a well thought out and executed web presence is of vital importance.

Having developed literally hundreds of websites over 20 years we’ve created a distinct way of working to deliver the best results for our clients. The websites we launch and look after are developed with a clear strategy, audience insights and a great user experience at their heart to build engagement, sales and loyalty.

So regardless of your project, whether that’s a small brochure website, a full-blown e-commerce presence, bespoke or open-source, or custom software or mobile app, we follow the same clearly defined methodology.

Our Five Phase Methodology

Our methodology is a clearly defined process that has been developed and improved over the 20 years we have been developing web and mobile solutions.

Web Development Methodology

Audit & Define

This phase is all about building an understanding of your business and web requirements, including challenges, objectives and future plans. This is also where we identify the timeline, essential requirements, budgets and how we can work together.

We’ll also want to start to understand what technology should be used, whether it needs to be scalable to consider future requirements and what your budget is so we can make the best possible recommendations. This is all vital as we want to deliver a solution that exactly meets your needs.

So, we kick things off with a discovery meeting, held face-to-face or online depending on the situation.

Once we have built an understanding of your business and what you want to achieve from your online presence, we identify an outline solution, the basic structure of your website or app and recommend which technologies are best suited to meet your objectives. We bring this all together, along with operational considerations including project management and timescales, in a fully costed proposal for your consideration.

Create

Once the proposal is accepted and we have your approval to proceed, we then need to do more investigation and analysis to produce a more detailed description of the scope of work.

For this we use our web and creative scoping documents, that have been developed over time to ask the right questions so we can build a sophisticated view of your exact requirements.

Our briefs enable us to formerly identify and record specific information regarding messaging, audience, content, look and feel, detailed site structure (site maps) and functionality. These documents are signed off by both parties and act as our reference point for our rationale and activities going forward.

Any differences to the original outline plan are identified, discussed and agreed with adjustments made to site structure, functionality, budgets and timescales as appropriate. This is an important part of this phase as we don’t want there to be any surprises at the end of the project.

During this phase we also put in place a detailed project plan and implement our project planning software to help us keep track of progress, ask for feedback and collaborate effectively. We also start building a comprehensive content plan that identifies what text is required, including headlines, sun-headings and body text plus primary and supporting imagery, social links, calls to action, benefit statements, testimonials, sign-up and contact forms, FAQs and supporting resources.

Once the briefs have been signed off, we then move onto looking at the design of the website. This can include the development of wireframes (a two-dimensional illustration of a page’s interface) and other prototypes, for presentation, amendment and approval.

Or we sometimes go straight into the user experience (UX) design phase, depending on the complexities of the project. We will suggest a website style guide with typeface and colour palette included with our concepts, along with designs created in Adobe XD so that you can review them in a browser and get a more authentic feel for the design of the site.

Implement

This is where all the technical magic happens including coding and integration of the appropriate platforms and third-party apps. These can include open-source content management systems, shopping carts, merchant accounts and payment mechanisms across a plethora of technologies and applications. In this phase we also populate the site with all the relevant content as identified in the content plan.

Reviews are conducted regularly with all project progress and information recorded in the project planning tool. We ensure that you review every page of the site including all the key features and functionality and make sure that everything is pixel perfect.

The final actions before going live include quality assurance testing, such as functional and user experience checks and cross-browser tests. Any bugs are fixed at this stage and final settings applied. Only once all these checks have been completed successfully and signed off will we then go live.

Manage

Once we have gone live, we don’t just leave you to it to manage on your own as we believe in a partnership approach. So, we ensure that you are familiar with how to use your website or application, including undertaking any necessary training.

The hosting, maintenance and security of your site is vital to its performance, and we have specialist packages to support this, which we will recommend as appropriate. We’ll also help with content management and look after your web address (URL) and email.

We also want to ensure optimum performance of your website and have a series of search marketing packages, including SEO, Google Adwords (PPC) and social media, to draw attention and drive traffic to your site, depending on your objectives.

Review

Regular reviews of the performance of your web presence are vital if we are to continually drive improvement and optimisation. These reviews happen alongside the maintenance of your site, and we’ll monitor hosting performance and security via a range of specialist tools. Should any issues come to light then we will proactively bring these to your attention and discuss any remedial actions.

We’ll also review any future requirements and functionality as identified in the Create phase to ensure that your website or app is constantly evolving to meet the expectations and requirements of your target audiences.

Search marketing reports are produced on a regular basis and Google Analytics used to measure results to give us data to make informed decisions about how to further improve performance.

Web and app projects can be complicated so it’s vital that they are carefully managed. By having our five-phased methodology in place we can control activity and ensure that each phase builds on the previous one and delivers the best possible results that will help you to achieve your objectives.