The web design development process - a useful guide to planning your site and working with turnround.

The Briefing

All turnrounds sites are bespoke - not template-based, so a face-to-face meeting is always a good start, as an understanding of your needs is the cornerstone of a successful web site development. We have listed below what would be useful to cover in the first briefing.

What turnround would like to know:

  • what does the site need to communicate?
  • what is its focus, reference, e-commerce, or promotional?
  • who is your target audience, and what will they want from the site?
  • who are your competitors?
  • how does it fit into your new or existing communications strategy?
  • technical considerations; do you have existing web hosting, domain names?
  • is any animation or specialist graphics or video required?
  • when do you want it?
  • and finally, an indication of budgets is helpful,
    but not essential.

1. Our Response

We respond to the brief with a detailed creative proposal. This will outline our approach to the site, its potential structure, content, and how and who will be working on your project. We outline the audience you are targeting, the best methods of building the site and the implications of these. As well as this, other technical and creative considerations will be addressed and explained as necessary. On top of all this, you will be given basic time scales/schedules and a full budget breakdown.

2. Site Structure & Design

After a more detailed briefing you will be presented with a draft site structure (flow diagram) for discussion and approval before work commences. Also, we may show a few working designs of how the site could look and function for you to trial.

'3-clicks to anywhere' - we aim to work within this rule wherever possible. This means that the navigation will be designed in such a way that from any place within the web site, you can reach anywhere else in 3-clicks or less.

Areas of discussion

  • Site navigation
  • Menu styles/positions
  • Colour schemes
  • Site structure and organisation
  • Media content
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
  • Accessibility
  • Content management / Maintenance
  • Statistics
  • Pay per click advertising

At this stage we will also set-up the web hosting and register your chosen domain names, if needed.

3. Providing us with images, text and graphics

Existing corporate brochures, identities, logos etc should be supplied to us, preferably in digital form so that we can match your existing corporate style. It is very important to at this stage to get as many design decisions made, because after work has started, it can be costly to make radical changes.

4: Who does what?

So you have the schedule and it will be full of job titles that you have heard of but might not know what they do...

5. Site testing

The test site will be updated throughout construction, so that you can always see the progress of the site. It will be constantly tested on the most popular browsers on the most popular operating systems throughout the whole site building process.

We do not use any proprietary technologies in our web sites that restrict its viewing to specific browsers or operating systems, or that require additional downloads to view the basic content.

7. Final upload and GO LIVE!

With the site finished it's time for your site to go live to its new worldwide audience.

8. Publicising the site

As soon as the site has gone live, you need to publicise it. This can take many forms and we will discuss with you which methods are suitable:

  • Paid for internet advertising
  • Adding the web address to your business stationary
  • Advertising in print publications
  • Submission to search engines
  • Targeted email campaigns
  • Mail shots