Our approach to web design and development projects

Building websites with a purpose - our marketing based approach

First steps...

Website Design - Form v Functiona) understand what your customers want from your website, and
b) identify your own objectives and desired outcomes 

There is no great benefit in indiscriminately bringing visitors to your website. What is important is getting the right visitors, and then getting them to do what you want them to do when they get there... a successful outcome might be to make a purchase, get in contact for pre-sales help or service support, engage with you via social media, or join a mailing list for example.

But at the same time you need to make sure that you fulfill your customers needs at the same time - frustrated customers are unhappy customers, unhappy customers are lost customers.

Understanding what successful outcomes you need from the outset are critical to the design process, as this influences every aspect of the design of your site.

Essentially our approach is to break the development project down into three broad phases:

Phase 1 – Planning and Specification

This involves setting the overall parameters for the project, and our approach to this is to work with you to assess the business need for the project and set the objectives for the site design. Areas typically covered in this process could include:

  • Evaluation of your strategic business need
  • Identifying benefits for you and your site users
  • Objectives and outcomes setting
  • Feasibility studies
  • Consideration of levels of integration with your existing systems (IT and business processes)
  • Budgetary assessment
  • Quantitative analysis of online target audiences
  • Visitor projections, revenue and profit modelling
  • Return on investment (ROI) and cost benefit assessments
  • Positioning within the existing marketing mix
  • Search term analysis and optimised site structure design
  • Planning and budgeting of ongoing promotional requirements
  • Preparation of technical specification and design brief

Phase 2 – Design and Build

Once the design parameters and objectives are established, we move onto the design phase. Some web design companies work up intial concept designs as part of the pitch (sales) process. We don't do this (not because we're lazy!), but because we believe that understanding the technical and user requirements comes first.

Presenting a visual idea too early, without understanding the priorities identified in Phase 1, can have a negative impact on the creation of a design, distracting attention from the far more important focus on the right successful outcomes.

Top Quality Design and Development

In 2009 we entered into partnership with leading marketing communications company Juicy Marketing, giving us a fantastic design capability covering all aspects of branding and graphic design, and not just for websites!

Of course the project doesn't end at the design stage! Once the visual design is decided, this has to be turned into the theme templates required by the content management system, and the system itself has to be installed and configured. Then comes the loading of your page content and testing and de-snagging. Finally, onsite training for your own staff, and the site is ready to go live.

Phase 3 – Promotion

Once your new web site is launched we can help you with the promotional needs for the new site.

In many cases this will include intitial search engine optimisation (SEO) of your key pages, followed by visibility reporting and a period of adjustment. This might be accompanied by a range of complementary activities such as:

  • An ongoing programme of deeper SEO
  • Position reporting: we can provide a suite of optimisation tools that help you track performance and manage your own marketing efforts
  • Pay per click advertising

Our aim is that at the end of this process, you will have a website that is fulfilling your objectives and meeting your customers' needs!