Let’s take a closer look at each individual steps:
Site Map Planning / Information Design
In many of our projects, this task is accomplished internally by our clients themselves. However, in certain cases, we can offer our services to help you define a clear and precise site map, as well as assist you to organize the content you may want to include on your web site.
Technical Planning
Since not all websites are created equally, a thorough review of your project's technical requirements is performed by our team in collaboration with your company's IT department (if you have one). At this stage, our team will determine how best to implement your website so that it runs as quickly and efficiently as possible. We will also help determine how best to integrate any of your existing applications into your website as required. By the end of our analysis, we will have a good idea of how your website will be built, its hosting requirements, and what will be required to make it all happen.
Design Planning
At this stage, a careful study of your company’s existing media and visuals is conducted. Also, if required, a review of the visuals of your competitors and/or partners websites is conducted. This is done to analyse what we may want to avoid, improve upon or emulate from other web sites. Finally, a series of open discussion between your company and our designers are conducted to capture your vision for your web site.
Please note that if your company has as existing branding guide (for printed and/or electronic media), we will comply with it: staying true to your primary and secondary colors, as well as font choices whenever possible.
Interface Design (Site Branding)
At this stage we establish what your site is going to look like. With the guidelines established in the Design Planning stage, we proceed with Site Branding (also called Interface Design). One or several drafts of your new Home Page are designed in Photoshop and presented to you as JPEGs for your approval. From this initial design, a back-and-forth process (between yourselves and our designers) is maintained until a final Home Page design is approved.
The Home Page design includes the design of the main menu, header, side menus (if required), text boxes, bullet, arrows, search box, etc…in other words, every element that is present on the screen.
Once the Home Page is approved, a similar process is initiated for the secondary pages of your site. Usually, 2 to 4 templates are enough to serve all the pages of your site.
Once the Home Page and the secondary pages are given final approval, we can move on to the next stage.
Site Production and Programming
The first step of this stage is to create HTML versions of the Home Page and the secondary pages that were created in Photoshop. A working version of the Home Page is usually built to let you test out the page elements such as the menus, links and mouse-overs. All our pages are built with code-compliant HTML and/or with whatever code requirements your IT department may have.
Once the Home Page and secondary pages templates are all approved, we can proceed with the full-scale production of your web site. The site architecture is built, the menus programmed and activated, and finally all the pages are constructed. Following this, any additional elements that require special attention, such a search engines, forms and polls, are programmed.
Please note that this stage proceeds slightly differently if the site will eventually be maintained by our Content Management System.
Beta Launch
Once the whole site is built and active, it is made available to you on a development server. This temporary site is private and is only available to you (and whoever you want to give access to). The site is then thoroughly reviewed and tested.
Based on the results of the review and testing, the site then goes through a process of corrections and troubleshooting.
The above steps are repeated until the whole site is free of errors and functions perfectly.
Final Launch
Once the Beta site is given final approval, the final site can be launched. Depending on your requirements, Expression will work with your IT team or hosting provider to transfer the site to its final destination.
If your site has special hosting needs (such as database management or other advance functions), we will put these in place.
Once your site is transferred to its final destination, it is checked and tested again to make sure no transfer errors occurred and that the site performs well on the server.
Congratulations….your site is now live!
Post Launch Technical Support
The fist few weeks after your site launch are critical. You will probably get a lot of feedback from your colleagues and from the on-line community regarding your content, site functionality and on your web site in general.
Expression will remain available during that time for any requests.
Web Site Updates
As days, weeks and months pass, the content of your site will have to be updated. Expression has several options available for this purpose. For an hourly fee, you can send us all updates, and let our professional webmasters update your site. Alternatively, if you estimate that you site’s content will change very frequently, you may want to consider FireFly (Expression’s Content Management System), where you can make all web updates yourself easily, without any knowledge of HTML or web design.
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