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The Web Design Process

We go through a series of steps on the way to creating your web page.

  1. Consider your needs.
  2. Getting the material to us
  3. Building your site
  4. Launching your site

Step 1: Consider your needs

You need to ask yourself the following questions before you embark on a new site or redo an old one.

  • What is the purpose of your site?
    • Are you using it as brochure to let people know about your business?
    • Do you want to add more to your site? For example customer service. Perhaps you have some product manuals or some common trouble shooting tips to put online..
    • Are you planning to sell goods or services via the web? You may need to investigate e-commerce solutions. Perhaps something as simple a web based form might work best.
  • Who is your audience? Are yout trying to attract specific clientele? You may need to tailor your text and graphics to a particular community.
  • Do you need hosting? Can your present host meet your needs? If it is simple hosting of static HTML, then they can. However, if you require some kind of dynamic website, you will need PHP & MySQL. Do they support PHP or MySQL databases?
  • What kind of design do you want? Having a clear idea of a design brief can save a lot of time and hassles. We need a clear idea of your desired colour scheme. Do you have some corporate colours? What colours do you use on your stationery? Having a consistent look across print and the web can be a good thing. Have a look at sites of you competitors. Have a look at other sites. Then make a list of sites you like and sites you don't.
  • Are you going to be updating it yourself?

Step 2: Getting the material to us

You can save a lot of time and money by getting the material to us in electronic formats.

  • Text: in any major word processing format such as MS Word, plain text, rtf and html format.
  • Photos: any major graphics format such as JPEG, GIF, TIFF or PNG.
  • Logos: These need to be in scalable format such as PostScript or PDF. You should be able to get PostScript files from your printing contractor. We often get logos in GIF or JPEG. These formats don't scale well. The end result that we have trace and redraw the logo. This can add several hours to the process..

Copyright and intellectual property rights

All material you supply to us must be: owned by you, or you have written permission to use it, or it is in the public domain. Supplying material to us implies that you own, have written permission for its use or that it is in the public domain.

Step 3: Putting it together

What we use:

We use the following software:

  • Dreamweaver for creating the web pages
  • Fireworks for the web graphics
  • TopStyle Pro to edit and create the cascading style sheets.
  • Text Editor for hand coding pages. Yes, it's old fashioned but it works wonders and can be more efficient.

The following technologies:

  • HTML. Our prefrence is using the XHTML standard for web pages. XHTML is emerging as the standard for the web.
  • CSS. Cascading Style Sheets to control the layout.
  • PHP. We use PHP scripting for dynamic sites
  • MySQL. MySQL database is used in conjunction with PHP to produce dymamic content.

How it is put together

Using the material and brief you supplied us, we will put the site together and test it on our local intranet server which runs Linux.

Our preference is to use the latest web standards and CCS layout for our designs. There are a number of reasons for this Firstly, it makes the site more accessible for those with disabilities. A number countries including the US and UK have laws mandating access for the disabled to websites Other countries will invariably introduce similar legislation. Text based sites are also easier for search engines to read and index. A number of sites are changing over to a text based design.eg JetStar, Commonwealth Bank, wired and espn to name some.

We then put your site together. Once we are satisfied that it is working, we will then place it on our testing server on the internet. You will be able to see how it performs and suggest any minor changes that are required.

Step 4: Launch

Looking at it on our test server enables you to get an idea how your site would perform under normal conditions. When you are satisfied, we upload your site to your web server.

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