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Skipton Web Design & Development
Web Design & Development
The Web Design Process
Here we describe how we work and the different phases involved in designing and developing a website from start to finish.
1. Initial Discussion
This is an opportunity for you to tell us a bit more about you or your business and the website you'd like. It's also a chance for you to ask any questions and for us to explain the different options open to you. The more information you can give us at this stage, the more we can help you. For more information about the sort of things we might ask, see Planning a Website.
The initial discussion can take place face-to-face, by phone or over email. After this discussion we can provide you with a quote. You can send us any text, photo's etc you'd like to use. It doesn't matter if you don't have any content at this stage - we can use placeholders.
You might find the following information useful at this stage:
2. Design
Following the initial discussion, we will develop a few different design ideas. You can choose one you like, or elements of different ones and request changes. For example, you might like to try one of the designs with a different colour scheme or font. We usually cycle around this step a few times to get a design you're happy with. At this stage we're just working with images showing how the site will look - this allows us to make changes quickly.
Initial design ideas for a hairdressers
3. Development
Once you're completely happy with a design, we ask for a deposit of 40% of the total quote. Upon receipt of the deposit, we will register your domain name, set up your hosting and build your site. We usually develop sites on our test hosting so you can check the progess. Whilst the site is in development, we can set up a 'holding' or 'coming soon' page on your address.
4. Launch
When you're happy with the site, we will move it from our test hosting to your live site. Just before launch we complete the following checks:
- Check the favicon is in place
- Upload a '404 - page not found' page
- Ensure there are no broken links
- Test any forms, e.g. a contact form
- Check that the code is standards-compliant
- Ensure the site behaves well with Javascript turned off
- Test the website on all recent versions of major browsers.
- Upload a sitemap and register the site with Google Webmaster Tools (helps with search engine ratings)
- Review the page titles and meta data (again this helps with search engine ratings)
- Set up Google Analytics (for visitor statistics)
- Register your site with the search engines
The remaining balance is payable once your site is fully functional. At this stage you might find our article Marketing Your Website useful.
5. Post Launch
After your site is launched, we're here to answer any questions you might have. Should you require additional work on your site, we can arrange this either on a hourly rate basis or we can give you a quote for a fixed piece of work.
