Our Methodology
How do we get from a site concept and idea to a fully functional website?
It's a fairly involved process and probably a lot more work than the average person realizes. But we will be here with you every step of the way - guiding you to figure out what you need and help you turn all those ideas into the site you envision.
So, how do we do it? Here's our step by step plan. Of course it varies from client to client, but you should get the picture.
Research & Requirements Gathering
Before we create a single mockup or write a line of code, we first start off by asking all our potential clients to fill out a short survey for us. This survey helps us by getting you to put down in words what it is you want out of your site, and what your goals are for the project. Once we have the survey filled out, we schedule a meeting - either in person, phone or online (we know how busy you are - and you'd be amazed what can be accomplished over chat or email). We listen to what you want for your site and we ask you questions to help us both figure out as much as possible about the direction and the functionality of the project. Then we go away and do some brainstorming about your new project. We take time to evaluate what the best route is to get you where you want to go.
The next step is a proposal and estimate which we provide to you. After you've signed off on that and provided us with a deposit to get us started, we get to work on providing you with a short document outlining the content and functionality that your site will contain. This step is crutial so that you know exactly what you are going to get and so we know exactly what to build.
Once we’ve developed a list of specifications, we create a simple site map showing the overall site hierarchy, send that over to you and then we get started on buildling your site!
With a site map in hand, and all the requirements for your site's functionality decided on, we can turn our attention to your site's design! This is when we typically bring in one of our design partners to get their creative juices flowing. We take your requirements and create some basic layouts for the site just to see where everything might sit on the screen. Next, we start designing the look and feel. We choose the right font and colour combination to complement your site. Whether we are designing around your existing logo or starting from scratch, our goal is make it look even better than how you imagined it!
When we're done, we send you a couple of mockups to review and comment on. We choose one and tweak the design until you are happy!Turning a mockup into a web page is all about HTML, well in our case we use standards-compliant XHTML for content and CSS for styling and layout. We'll be honest and tell you that we didn't always use the XHTML/CSS combination, but we've righted our wrongs and all our sites from now on are going to be standards based.
Why standards based? Well basically we want our sites to render correctly in any and all browsers that you can think of, and being standards compliant gets you as close to that as you can get (well at least until a certain Washington company finally decides to build standards compliant browsers.. but I digress).
So at this stage, we will slice up your mockups and hand code the XHTML/CSS that will turn your idea into a web site!
While all this creative design is going on, we have also probably started on your application development. Depending on what your needs are, we might be customizing a simple blog like Wordpress, or creating all the pages and extensions of your custom Adsum Drive CMS, or even beginning development on your custom web application.
Whatever the goal, we can do all the development totally in parallel with the design. When we put it all together, you'll have the framework for your brand spanking new website!
Along the way, we've probably been asking you to start gathering and writing your content. This is the time when we put all that in. If you've gone with a static site, we'll copy and paste all the necessary content for you. If you've gone with a CMS system, we'll get you started by entering most of it, but we'll use the rest of it to help you learn how to add and edit content yourself.
Making sure your site works exactly as you pictured is of the utmost importance to us. So we will rigorously test your site against the original requirements. At this stage, we will probably also ask you to start playing around on the site as well to make sure it is all you dreamed of. And of course if you, or we, find anything wrong with it - we'll fix those problems at this point.
The final step in the process is deploying your new site, or going LIVE!! Until this point, we were probably developing the site on our server, or somewhere hidden to the general public. Now that it's time to go live and you're approved the site - we copy everything over to your server or remove the "under construction" pages and let the world see your beautiful new website!
Then you tell all your friends...they love the site too.. and you refer all your friends to Adsum Drive to build them sites too! And the world is a happy place :)
