Our website process
Information architecture
This typically involves the following activities:
- Consultation: Understanding your organisation by reviewing strategic documents, analysing analytics and other data, speaking to staff and looking at peers and competitors.
- Audience research: Working with you to identify key audience groups, conducting interviews and developing an understanding of their motivation, behaviour, and information needs.
- Data structure and site maps: Designing a new structure for your website, including navigation, content types, taxonomies and other useful organising principles.
- Wireframes and prototyping: Visualising page layouts and basic interactions and establishing a hierarchy of content that balances the requirements of your different audiences.
- Workshops: Presenting our ideas and collecting your feedback to help us to refine our approach. We’ll outline various options and work together to clarify all of the finer details.
- User involvement: Testing our ideas with users using activities and tools such as card-sorts, tree tests and prototypes. Insights from are used to help us refine our ideas.
- Functional specification: The key deliverable for this phase. We’ll provide a detailed document for that contains the data structure, site maps and wireframes that specify your new website.
Design
This typically involves the following activities:
- Creative brief: Documenting an agreed approach for the design that includes relevant research insights and information about existing conventions such as style and brand guidelines.
- Exploration: Creating designs for a small set of pages and components that broadly represent your website. We’ll present to key decision-makers and seek feedback for further refinement.
- Components and layouts: Once the visual approach has been agreed, we produce designs that span a broad range of website components and templates, at mobile and desktop widths.
- User involvement: Testing visuals or layouts with users to identify areas of confusion or opportunities for improvement. Testing can take place with flat designs or interactive prototypes.
Development
This typically involves the following activities:
- Server and CMS setup: Creating a staging environment, deploying the WordPress content management system and content types and taxonomies based on the agreed data structure.
- Template development: Rendering the agreed designs in HTML and CSS and integrating with the WordPress code. We then configure interactive elements such as menus, modals and accordions.
- Browser testing: Testing the code across a set of supported browsers and a range of mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Browser specific fallback options are implemented as needed.
- Handover & training: Handing the website over to you for ‘user acceptance testing’. We’ll provide you with a full training session supplemented by remote telephone support.
- User involvement: Conducting a final round of user testing on a staging website to identify usability issues or refinement opportunities that can be addressed prior to launch.
- Launch: Transferring the domain name to our server, setting-up redirects, configuring analytics and monitoring site performance carefully during the first few days.
Project management
Our approach is based on carefully documented processes and clear milestones. It incorporates the following elements:
- A written brief
- Budget & schedule updates
- A dedicated project team & project manager
- A risk log
- Confidentiality agreements (where required)
Projects may require careful stakeholder consultation and management, We’ll work with you to identify who the key decision-makers are and ensure they are appropriately engaged
We employ a variety of tools to support our project management including Trello for collaboration.