What am I building? Who is this for? What will it do? These are some of the questions we are going to ask you. In order to build a great functional product, your ideas should be clear and concise. Don't worry we are here to help you along the way. It is our job to help solve your digital dilemmas. This is where user stories come in. User stories help us to organize the pieces of your big idea.
This is where the visual layout of the project begins to take shape. Using information gathered from you in the planning phase, we begin designing the layout with sitemaps then move to wireframes and sketches. After the basic layout has been established we will start adding the bells and whistles like photography and color. A cycle of reviewing, tweaking and approving the mock-ups often takes place until both parties are satisfied with the design.
This is when your project really comes to life. We will build a content management system (CMS) that suits your needs. Depending on your requests, software needs, and server restrictions this process is usually the most unique per client. We always vow to have our sites work in a variety of current and, more importantly, older browsers. We try to support 2 releases back from the latest IE release. Unfortunately, we can't support very old browsers without sacrificing newer features, which is why it is so important to define who your user is in the discovery phase. Once the CMS is complete we will load in all the content you have provided like images, graphics, and text.
We run through some final testing and make sure there are no problems before going live. We outline a plan to transfer the website to the final web server and ensure the domain and DNS (Domain Name System) strategy has been handled and set up as outlined in the discovery phase. To transfer a new site, typically it will be on the live server before launch, we are actually just pushing traffic to the server on the 'live date'. For redesigns, we are typically removing the old code from the live server and deploying our new code. With proper planning, this transition can occur in just a few quick minutes, minimizing downtime.
As application strategists, we understand that a good site is never finished. We typically will be deploying a project with some sort of backend content management system for you to edit the content yourself, but we are always here to help with future versions and help you succeed.