An overview of our web design process

Initial Consultation and Quotation

You provide us with your requirements. It's essential that you give us all the information you possibly can about what it is you want to achieve, and what you need in order to achieve it.

We can send you an initial design questionnaire to help.

Once we have a good idea of what you need, we can put together a quotation, to include all the elements of design and production. We can also give you an estimate of how long the project should take and work to a specific deadline if needed.

---

Contract and Deposit

If you're happy with the figures we outline in our quotation we will provide a contract for you to sign and return. Once we've received the contract and initial deposit the design process will start.

We usually ask for a 25% deposit of the total fee prior to the project commencing (50% deposit for starter package websites). The remaining balance is payable on completion for projects under £400 and prior to publication. If the project total is more than £400 we can offer monthly interest free payments.

---

Design Stage

If you have commissioned a bespoke design then we will start to work on some visuals for your website, starting with the home page. We normally provide a couple of initial layout ideas for you to view.

It is useful if you are able to provide us with some initial content at this stage i.e. draft text and any images that you want to include on the site. This helps us to come up with a layout that will work with your content.

We usually put the visuals up on our development server for you to view via a link to a temporary web space. If you like one of the initial designs and no amendments are needed then we can start work on developing the site. If however, the layouts are not quite right or you like some aspects of the designs and not others, just let us know and we will amend the designs to suit or create a completely new design if necessary.

---

Development Stage

Once a design has been agreed and you are completely happy with it we will start the development stage. We start creating the functioning pages and navigation along with any additional features such as a slideshow or a content management system.

---

Testing and Optimisation

We test the site as we are building it to ensure it meets current W3C web standards where possible and can be viewed as intended on all the major browsers e.g. Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc. We also check that the header code contains relevant keywords and descriptions to ensure the site is optimised for the search engines.

---

Approval and Publication

Once we have completed the website design and construction, we will ask you for an emailed approval to publish the website. Ultimately, the responsibility for proofreading and textual accuracy lies with our clients, which is why the proofing and proofreading stages are so vital.

If you are happy that the site is complete and no further changes are needed we will invoice you the remaining fee (unless staged payments have been agreed in the contract) and on receipt of payment we will publish the site.

Once the site is published we will register the site with the major search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing so that it can be picked up and ranked.

Please note: it can take a few weeks for your site to be picked up by Google.