Our Web Development Process

Request a Quote / Place an Order

Initial contact from you requesting a quote or an inquiry

The initial inquiry, or contact requesting a quote, normally comes through our website. Sometimes this is for additional information, but more often, it is a request for a website. If your inquiry is for additional information then this is provided via email. When your inquiry is a quotation for a website then more extensive communication is required.

First consultation with you to explore requirements

This is the first step where we capture your requirements so that a brief is created. This brief lets us know if you are looking for a brand new website, a revamp of an exiting site, or help in promoting your existing site. During this stage we need to know about your ideal customer, you objectives for the site, and a lot more information about you and your business.

Convert your requirements into a quotation

During the analysis, or discovery stage, we do some research to convert your requirements, or brief, into a proposal. Initial research is done into your competition, keywords, and market, so that a working solution can be generated. Also during this stage, we create an overview of the proposed website with images of the home page, content structure, and navigation on the website.

Present quotation to you and your acceptance

This is the stage where we present the proposed solution to you. You can now let us know if our understanding of your requirements is correct. The proposal consists of the work involved in creating or revamping your site, costings and timings.

The costings will be broken down between a) initial cost of the site, b) cost for after-sales promotion and maintenance, and costs for additional items & functionality if you wish to avail of them. Once you approve of both the proposed design and the costs we begin work in earnest.

We Build Your Site

Design the solution for you

The planning and design stage is critical to the overall success of your site. We have a lot of work to do here to ensure that we design a solution for you that matches your requirements and comes within your budget and time scales. On your side, this is the stage where you provide us with the content for your site as well as images as per the proposal.

Normally, all content and images are provided by you unless otherwise specified. We will take your content and adjust it if necessary so that it is integrated into your site.

Apply SEO techniques to increase the viability of your site

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not necessarily a separate stage and takes place throughout the process. We will have explored the keywords for your site during the analysis stage, applied our knowledge to how the site should be navigated and used, and then apply the SEO research to modify your content appropriately.

After your site is live, monitoring takes place as well as promotion. SEO is the best way to ensure the viability of your site and to generate traffic. We can give you a separate quotation for SEO if you want us to do in-depth analysis and promotion.

Create your website

Together with the planning & design stage, this is where we spend most of our time. The actual website and database (if required) is created in a test environment fully integrated with your content and images. We turn your requirements and the design into a working solution. This stage takes a few days to complete depending on the complexity of your requirements and of the design.

Test your website

This is one of the most crucial stages in the overall development of your site. Testing is done in at least the following areas: against your requirements, coding, on different computers and browsers, usability, accessibility, and performance. If this stage is skipped, then issues and errors occur in your site throughout its lifetime.

Your Site is Published

You review the site

The site is still on a test server but it is fully functional and accessible over the Internet. We give you access to the site so that you can verify that your site has been completed to your satisfaction. Also during this stage, any training or documentation that is required is produced. This is your chance to request final adjustments to the site before we make it live.

Go-live and implement your website

Putting the site live involves a couple of important steps. We use your domain and hosting if this is what you asked for, otherwise we provide you with the domain and the hosting. As well as implementing your site on the live domain/hosting, we implement Google Analytics for you and submit your site to the major search engines so that you can get indexed as soon as possible.

Maintenance and Reporting

Monitor your site and produce reports

Having a site which is live is only some of the story. The monitoring process ensures that the site is up and running 24 hours per day and tracks usage on the site.

Reporting is broken down into two main areas: usage and SEO performance. Usage reporting involves Goggle Analytics to see who is using your site, what pages/content is used, what parts of the site are working, and generating advice for future changes.

Performance reporting involves SEO performance tracking to see where the site is ranking on the search engines on the keywords that were identified earlier in the development process as well as actually generating advice to improve that performance.

Ongoing maintenance of your website

A site that is never maintained will eventually have rankings so low that nobody ever finds the site via the search engines. It is of vital importance to ensure that new and fresh content is provided regularly, whether on the site itself, via articles, blogs, or some other means.

Any advice generated from the monitoring and reporting process is implemented here. Also part of maintenance, is updating addresses, phone numbers, dates, email addresses, new product or services - essentially ensuring that changed business conditions are reflected in the site.

Promote your site

Promoting a site takes time and effort. To get a site to rank reasonably well can take up to six months. If a marketing budget is available then Paid Advertising (PPC) is an area that can be looked at. A lot of companies use this to get their site onto the first page of the search engines while waiting for the natural ranking to increase. During an SEO promotion campaign, work is done to increase the "importance" of the site as well as the traffic to the site via a linking campaign.