During design and development we follow our own in house process that has been refined using experiences and feedback gained from our clients. This consists of 8 simple steps through which we can implement a robust waterfall development methodology to ensure our projects are delivered on time and in budget.

Step 1: Kick Off

We meet with key project stakeholders to gain further insight into the project direction and goals, reflection on proposal and discussion of creative direction. Upon completion of this meeting, we produce a high level technical specification that can be shared with your team for review and edits, before handing it over to our technical lead so they have a good understanding of the core developmental requirements of the project.

Step 2: User Experience

These insights then lead us to the creation of user journeys, calls to action and the information hierarchy – enabling us to understand at what points in the site your audience might want to complete a series of actions. This is a vital ingredient to understanding how the site is going to be used and the drivers for behaviours and engagement.

It’s also at this stage that we often undertake a storytelling workshop with your team and our lead strategist, the purpose of which would be to hone the messages of the project to meet its goals. Generally speaking, it’s a half day session, extracting the key messages and feeding into the information architecture of the site.

Step 3: Share with Client

After garnering a thorough understanding of the site’s technical and content structure, we move into the initial wireframing process. This stage is led by our design team, who create responsive, mobile-first wireframes, setting out the visual structure and layout of the content. They will work closely with our content specialists and share these designs with your team for an open, collaborative approach.

Step 4: Creative Process

Once the wireframes have been agreed, we move into full design. As design is so subjective, we like to establish the visual tone of the project first and agree this with your team before tackling the full design. This usually happens through us designing 30% of the site and then iterating that core visual framework to meet your satisfaction before completing the design.

Step 5: Development

Overlapping with the final stages of the design, our development team begin building the site, using the progressive enhancement methodology – ensuring that the site can be experienced across myriad devices and browsers. We ensure that our projects meet WCAG ‘AA’ accessibility standards and continuously strive to develop not only beautiful experiences, but accessible ones.

Step 6: Test Plan & Content Upload

Around 40% of the way through the build, we launch a private and secure development site so that the testing process can begin internally. We thoroughly test our sites across devices and browsers, using tools such as Browserstack for legacy browser versions where necessary. This is also the period of time where content editors are able to begin uploading and sense-checking copy, videos, animation and so on.

Step 7: User Acceptance Testing

Once development is complete, we open the testing to you and your stakeholders and ask you to check through the site yourselves to highlight any changes that you’d like us to make before the site goes live.

Step 8: Optimisation

Rather than simply naming this step ‘Go Live’, we often find that we develop strong, positive relationships with our clients throughout the lifecycle of a project and therefore work with them beyond the original scope to deliver new additions or changes as their needs as businesses change over time. Thus we refer to this as the Optimisation phase, providing you with an ongoing development partner that can work collaboratively with you to ensure your digital project is sustainable and aligned to your business.