How We Work

Producing a site goes through several stages. While the time spent at each stage will generally vary from project to project they tend to run as below.

1) We get to know you and your requirements
In most cases we will have a meeting with you, face to face, to determine exactly what you expect and to discuss your options. This time is usually spent splitting the website out into different sections and deciding what is required in each area. At the same time we will learn more about your business and customers, this helps us with the day to day design and development decisions that need to be taken.

2) Quotation
Back at the office, we will discuss your needs amongst ourselves and draw up a brief, splitting the project into "chunks". Each chunk will be given a time estimate by the team member that would be responsible for completing it. At this stage we may make further contact to confirm small details or put forward any additional ideas we may have had in the mean-time. These collective estimates are added to the quote, which will be forwarded to you. Assuming you accept our proposal(s), a PID (Project Initialisation Document) will be forwarded, which seals the contract between us and authorises us to proceed.

3) Design
At this point our designer will begin to experiment with a site design, in many cases this will be from scratch in others we may be required to follow some rules (i.e. ensuring the use of your corporate colours or styling cues). From wexperience we operate on the premis that 'choice confuses' so will submit one design concept at a time, unless otherwise requested by you.

Once settled on a layout the selected design will be developed into a template. This means the graphical "image" of the design is converted into HTML by hand - this template is then used as a basis for all pages in a site or application.

4) Development
If your project requires any sort of dynamic elements (such as with an e-commerce site) the template will be passed over to a member of the development team who will build the software that sits behind the scenes. In most cases we find that bespoke applications are required to power the key areas of the website. It's at this point where we are able to provide access to the view the site on our development server. In some cases we will suggest that you start populating the database on this server before we move to the next stage.

5) Deployment
At the end of development, when both parties happy that the project is complete and, where nexessary, populated sufficiently with data it will be deployed to our web servers. This process can take an hour or two to complete depending on configuration settings and/or ensuring that third party services are 'live', e.e payment gateways.