Please contact us for a complimentary marketing consultation and review
To successfully deliver a website to a deadline and budget it is imperative to have a process-driven approach. Ours has been carefully refined from invaluable experience and industry best practices, and serves as the foundation for all our website projects.
As with any communication project, it makes sense to explore the audience, industry/sector and desired outcome – and use the information to develop the functional requirements of a site. All client stakeholders are consulted in the discovery process. So we start with a lot of questions.
Once we have determined the overall goals and parameters of a project we can put together a proposed communications brief for clients to debate and ultimately approve. Only then can we know we are all pointing in the right direction and effectively kick-off a project.
These are largely administrative tasks – we need to set budgets, timing plans, allocate a team and establish the user-testing before we get underway. This becomes the basis of the project plan – what’s going to happen and when.
Audit and analyse. Without good, relevant content your site won’t be compelling. Content and structure are intertwined – you cannot create one without the other. Division and categorisation of pages is necessarily determined by content, and the way in which you organise a site’s content defines the backbone for the structuring process.
Being able to see the whole site at once is an important perspective whilst structuring. In much the same way that a house needs to be architecturally blue-printed, a site also needs to have its structure drawn.
This is the site ‘storyboard’. With content addressed and the sitemap created we need to look carefully at the site on a page-bypage basis. By examining how a page needs to work we can present it in a way that is meaningful and logical to your audience.
At this stage we ensure your website has a great creative idea, has strong brand cohesion and is immediately engaging. However, the clever bit is working all of this into a design that is user friendly and allows the site to be search engine optimised, responsive and robust.
During the visual design phase it’s important to take time to confirm the content, page flow navigation and proposed functionality finalised in the development stage and rehearse the user functionality. It’s a sensible time and budget-saving exercise.
Once the look and feel is defined and approved, graphic templates and a design style guide need to be created to allow the design to be consistently applied across the website.
This is where all the pieces are put together and made to work, so it’s important before launching into this stage to calmly re-address the original expectations and scope of the project.
The time taken in careful preparation will really pay dividends at this point. If everything is in place then this can be a very streamlined process, allowing for the pages to be ‘crunched’ through in a confident, measured fashion.
It’s important to keep testing the site during the build, in order to eliminate bugs and ensure optimum functionality when the website is delivered.
The project has been ‘hands-on’ up to this point, but now it’s time to go ‘hands-off’. There needs to be a transition between the builders and those who will maintain and update the site post-launch – both in terms of meetings and reference documentation.
It’s fairly uncommon for a site to go live completely ‘bug-free’, so in reality the actual launch is really nothing more than a significant milestone in the overall project timeline, with a few factors still requiring some resources.
Everybody wants the new site to be successful so the on-going maintenance needs to be carefully reviewed post-launch. A regular review meeting is always useful, where the site usage, maintenance and infrastructure can be assessed – and problems rectified rapidly.
LAW Creative is a marketing and advertising agency | Hertfordshire | London Address: 4 Waterside, Station Road, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 4US. Tel: 01582 469 300 | Fax: 01582 460 050. Leisure at Work Communications Ltd trading as LAW Creative. Registered in England 3690515. © 2009 LAW Creative. All Rights Reserve.