We create clear, accessible websites designed to meet the specific needs of your business and its customers.

Our design and development process helps us to create a website that is closely integrated into your business and has a clear set of aims and objectives.

Discovery

At the beginning of the process, we spend time with you to understand everything we can about how your business operates, who your customers are and what makes you unique.

We will work with you to discuss your aims and objectives for the site and to determine the site structure and content needed to meet your stated goals. We will also discuss what metrics we need to put in place to measure how successful the site is in achieving those goals.

The discovery phase will result in an approved site structure plan and details of the content required.

Design

Taking the approved site structure plan as the foundation, we then incorporate your brand identity and personality, to create a clean, well-structured design for your site.

With an emphasis on great typography and clear layout, our design will communicate your content effectively to your customers, allowing them to find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

We work with live HTML prototypes for your site, designed to be fully responsive from the outset. These present your content in an optimal way to your visitors, whether they are using the latest smartphone or a large widescreen display.

When we share our designs with you, you will be seeing them as live web pages in a browser, not as static visuals. So you won’t need to try and imagine how they will look when they are coded in HTML and CSS, you’ll be seeing them that way already.

By going to code early on in the design process, we can iterate over the design more quickly to refine it.

Development

Once we have an approved design for the site, we will build out the structure of the site in a content management system (CMS). This separates out the content of the site from the HTML and CSS templates that determine how the content is displayed. Using a good CMS enables you to keep your website maintained yourself, without needing to come back to us to make updates for you (unless you would prefer us to do them).

We recommend and use ExpressionEngine and CraftCMS for our projects. They are both modern, very flexible CMSs with excellent security and reliability and are commercial products. Whilst there are a number of free, open source CMSs available, we think that by paying for a commercial CMS you are buying into the future of the software that your site depends upon. This gives a level of reassurance that you simply don’t get with many open source CMSs. It also means that, as users are paying to use the software, it is under continual development, so that bugs are being fixed and security maintained in a timely manner. After all, it’s in the commercial interests of the software company to keep its product reliable and safe for its users.

Optimisation

An important part of our development process is making sure that the CMS templates and code are optimised effectively to make sure that your site loads quickly and efficiently. The speed of a website has an impact on search engine ranking, with Google rewarding faster sites, so it is important to keep an eye on the performance of your site. By optimising the code of the site and using good quality hosting, your visitors won’t be left waiting for your site to load.