Our website design process

Here at WDG we like to get to know our clients. Not because we’re nosey or registered stalkers. We just feel it gives us a better starting point to produce a design that suits our clients taste as well as their companies requirements. As design is all about personal taste it’s sometimes easier to cater for a client if you know a little about them. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean we’ll be checking your credit history or going through old school reports. A chat on the phone or in person is normally enough to make that connection. This part of the process is the information gathering phase. This can also include a design brief if it’s available but really just boils down to getting as much information about your company and the project as possible.

Once we know a bit about you and your company and have gathered all text content and images we can move on to planning the project. At this point we work out the structure of the website, what functionality has to be incorporated and what the best layout will be to make it as usable as possible for the widest range of users. If the website is to be content managed we will work out which pages can be grouped together that use the same template so we know the number of templates required to build a functional website that is expandable for future growth. We will also look at the content that has been gathered and identify keywords for search engine optimisation.

The fun part of designing the website is next. We take everything we’ve learned up until now and mix it all together to produce the look and feel of the site. This will be presented to you as flat images and will change and progress until you are happy with the final design. Once you are happy we will ask you to sign off the design so that we can progress to building the website. This is very important as once the website design is signed off you have committed to this design and the development phase will start. Any design changes after this point will then incur additional costs.

We now move on to build the website from the agreed design. This includes creating the coded html pages that will be used within the content management system to create templates that will be used to add pages to your website. Once these are added to the CMS functionality can be added to include such things as interactive galleries, contact forms, product catalogues, availability calendars and more.

Once the website is built and all the pages are added with relevant content we will test the website to make sure it is robust and works on various different browsers. All our websites are validated to meet W3C standards to ensure the best performance and that they are ready to perform well within search engines. Once we are happy that everything is finished we will launch the website and send you an invoice. Happy days.