Process Makes Perfect

A key ingredient to our clients’ success is our strategic project methodology—a process that we’ve refined over the 15+ years we’ve been in business. Our approach features thorough strategy definition, iterative design and development practices, and constant client/agency communication. This four-step process is designed to ensure you feel comfortable and in control every step of the way.

Kickoff Meeting

1-2 WEEKS

This is the first opportunity for the whole team to meet in person. We review the proposal and discuss goals, timeline, and budget. We explain project roles and responsibilities for each team. Finally, we plan next steps and start preparation for the discovery sessions.

Discovery Sessions

1-2 Weeks

We meet with your team, stakeholders throughout your organization, and your most important customers about their goals and needs. We review your capabilities to make sure we design something you can build and support. And we review your brand for communication and messaging requirements.

Strategy Boards

2-4 Weeks

We take everything learned in the discovery sessions and condense it into a set of quick-read presentation boards that will be used as a foundation for decision-making for the rest of the project. There's a board for business goals & vision, a board for each persona, and a workflow board to plan for the future.

Style & Functionality Review

1 Day

When you say you want a "clean," "transformative," or "youthful" design, what do you mean? At this meeting, we get decision-makers together to discuss how they perceive different designs styles. We also look at best practices for your industry, reviewing sites from competitors and peer organizations. This helps us understand what's most important to you in terms of design aesthetic and functionality.

Wireframe Concept

2-3 Weeks

During this phase, we translate ideas and strategy into a rough working protoype of the site. What kind of content is on each page? How do people move around the site? What kinds of features will we support? At this point the ideas are rough and we work closely with you to get feedback and test ideas.

Wireframe Refinement

1-2 Weeks

This is where the prototype is starting to look like a real site. The pages are refined to make sure they meet goals and work well. Where possible, we use real content. This is a good time to start user testing and showing the site internally for feedback. It's also time to start producing content!

Wireframe Final

1 Week

As wireframing winds down, we make any last adjustments based on user and internal feedback. It's important to note that the final wireframes are the basis for the rest of the project—we will design and build to this content and feature set. Any major revisions beyond this point will likely impact the schedule and budget.

Visual Design Concept

2-3 Weeks

Now that we've decided what the pages do and how they work—it's time to decide how the site will look. Based on our style review, we'll spend some time working on a few example pages exploring different visual ways to express our goals. We'll work with you to incorporate your brand identity standards and create a look-and-feel the expresses your online essence.

Visual Design Refinement

1-2 Weeks

Which concept will we use? There will be a lot of opinions and discussion. Luckily, the discovery boards from the beginning of the project will help us make the right decisions during these reviews by providing objective measures and criteria. We'll pick one design, refine it based on feedback, and extend it to several pages.

Visual Design Final

1 Week

As the visual design phase winds down, we make any last refinements to the designs and start looking forward to production. When final designs are approved, we freeze the design and build to those comps. During this step we'll also create a design guide to aid in content entry and page design for the production team, and future site updates.

Site Build

4-8 Weeks

This is the hard part for a lot of clients, because it's hurry up and wait while our engineering and production teams turn static comps into real working pages. There's a ton of work to do behind the scenes, from database design and CMS templates on the back end to HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the front end.

Content Entry

2-4 Weeks

If we've done our job and kept pushing you to develop content, you should be ready to put it all together. As page templates go live, we'll work with you to start building pages and entering content into the new site. There are also images to find, links to hook up, and another round of internal proofing.

Quality Assurance

1 Week

The final step in construction is quality assurance. We'll look at cross-browser testing, make sure all the features work, double-check the content, and generally give it that final polish so it shines!

Site Launch

1 Day

Congratulations—you made it! We've come a long way from the initial meetings and strategy, built and tested wireframes, explored and refined visual design, and made the comps into a living, breathing site. Take a moment to savor success—you deserve it!

Training & Documentation

1-2 Weeks

One of the last steps in the production process is to teach you how to use the site. You'll learn how to update content, change images, create new pages, and manage users. In conjunction with the design guide and original discovery boards, you have all the tools you need to run the site for years to come.

Site Support

4 Weeks

Running a website is a big deal, and working out the kinks of a new system and workflow won't happen overnight. We're here for you during a one-month period of transition to fix bugs, answer questions, and generally make sure you feel comfortable with all of the facets of the new site.