WEBSITE DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT - THE PROCESS
Sound like a lot of work? Absolutely! But it pays off when designing a quality website that promises to strengthen your business and improve your communications.
Phase 1: Define Your Website Goals
CT Website Design team, Insight Design Studios Project manager will meet with you to determine your website needs. IE. How many pages are you expecting in your site? What specific functionality do you need (shopping cart, opt-in/opt-out newsletter, content management etc)? What ideas do you have for your new site?
We will ask many questions in order for us to calculate the creative and technical direction we need to pursue. This process may also produce additional ideas for your new site; options that you had not thought about; ideas that may help your business grow.
Phase 2: Developing the Website Structure
This is an outline of your website's structure/content that shows the paths visitors will take as they move through your site (also known as a sitemap or wireframe).
We want you to state 2 or 3 major products or services you are targeting in order to trigger a response from site visitors. This helps generate a click through rate, a search engine optimization strategy.
This process helps you to see which content needs to be developed further and helps our designers incorporate the appropriate navigation to the overall design of your website.
In this phase, we'll ask you to submit any materials relating to your brand. This would include; logos, brochures, photography and any other visual representations that might help us bring the essence of your company to the web.
Once we have a clear understanding of the project goals, we design the general layout, customized to your needs. We provide a minimum of 3 examples for you to choose from. From these examples we will rework some details based on characteristics you prefer. After this you will have a clear picture of what your new site will look like.
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Phase 4: Website Construction, Programming and Testing
At this point the site will be built based on your needs from phase 1 and the final structure from phase 2. The amount of programming varies from site to site. All features that are agreed upon will be built and rigorously tested by both our people and yours.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of making minor changes to your website to improve its chances of ranking well on search engines. This includes choosing keywords that people might use to search for a business like yours, putting the keywords in right place in your website’s content, and having sufficient content on each of your Website pages.
Although it takes time to get a good position on search engines, when you begin to effectively optimize your website, you will start to notice higher and higher rankings on the search results pages.
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Phase 6: GO LIVE
Now that your new website design and development is complete and content is populated, we're ready to go live. The release of your site is clear-cut, due to the extensive testing throughout the design process.
Once your site is live we write and submit a press release announcing that your organization has launched their new site, up-selling new features of the site. We then post it on our blog then tweet and facebook the launch of your site. All this external linking, known as link building, also helps with search engine optimization.
We suggest that you make an announcement to your clients with an eBlast.
Phase 7: Ongoing Site Maintenance
At this point the website is released and our job of creating the site is complete. However, since public websites are your face to the world, they must be kept current in terms of graphics, content and usability.
After release of the site, we will work with you to establish a regular review and maintenance schedule for your website to accommodate client requests, user feedback, system upgrades and emerging web technologies.
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