Picture the scene. The location is Unspun’s Sheffield office. Neil and Ed have just finished a call where a new client partnership has been agreed. The atmosphere is raucous, high-fives are being thrown, champagne is flowing, gongs are being rung.
After we’ve calmed down - and we find ourselves regularly in this position - we realise there’s a lot of work to do to turn the things we’ve just been speaking about into something we can hand over to the client. And we’ve got to do it before we get paid. Best get to work then.
This blog post aims to sum up this journey. The route we take from idea to delivery.
“Discovery” is a bit of a web designery term, so to translate from web designer language to standard English: in this step we learn more about your business, what drives the website's requirements so that our suggestions are genuine and helpful.
It’s this detailed understanding that keeps us on track throughout the course of the project, and it’s these initial conversations that get the gears turning to help us get the ideas out of our brains, and into shapes, colours, and code on the screen.
By far the most important bit of any project, important because if we don’t do it, and you ask us “how long’s it going to take”, we’re not going to be able to give you a straight answer.
The good news is we rarely need much input from the customer at this stage, we do the work, and produce a project plan to let you know exactly what is happening, when it’s happening, and how we avoid bad things along the way.
A complex project might need some technical blueprinting at this stage, which can extend this phase, but will pay dividends later down the line when it comes to writing the code.
The design phase is where projects start to get exciting. We’ll prototype key parts of your website, like the homepage, any bits where the user interacts with forms or controls etc in our design software, and send you a link to view.
At this point, you can tell us whether the logo is too big or too small, we can try out different colours, and we’ll keep tweaking and refining the design until you’re 100% happy with it.
We’re going to make absolutely sure you’re 100% happy at this stage too because any ambiguity can cause problems later down the line. Design changes beyond this point become increasingly hard to enact, so we want to lock the design in because we don’t want to cause delays or increase costs later on.
This is where we work our magic and begin work coding the website, in accordance with our website design, and in line with the goals and methodology we set out in the planning phase.
You’ll get regular progress updates as this stage happens, and you’ll begin to see the project take shape as we step through the goals defined in the planning stage.
There’s always a bit of overlap between the build and testing phases, simply because we might want you to test things as they become ready. Staging is the act of putting a version of the website up on a private link, so we can add all the content and get it looking launch ready.
At this stage, we aim to stamp out any bugs on the website we've built. We’ll be testing it on a bunch of different devices, and doing our best to push it to its limits. We encourage customers to do the same, and for complex projects we might outsource some testing to an external specialist firm.
By this point we’ve got a completely functional and bug-free website, and the actual launching of it is fairly anti-climactic. We just flip a switch and make the staging website public on your domain of choice, and then maybe go to the pub for a drink to celebrate.
Keeping the website healthy and functional from this point is important, but the post launch care steps are just as important as these design steps, so we’ll cover them in another post.
If you’d like to know about our website design process in more detail, or you’re thinking about embarking on your own web project adventure, get in touch for an informal, no obligation chat.
"I had the pleasure of working with Ed recently on a branding / graphic design project, which was not only executed ahead of the deadline, but also to an exceptional level of detail."
Diana
