Argument from Design: Our Approach
Begin at the Beginning
We start by asking you a lot of questions: we ask detailed questions about how you see yourselves & your business. This clarifies both your business process & your corporate ethos, so that what we make for you—both graphics & web applications—will truly represent what you do.
Depending upon what you want us to do for you, our programming team can deliver a specifications document—essentially a blueprint of the programming that we’ll do for you—or (our recommended solution) we’ll use our Agile Development process to create a spec in a more dynamic fashion.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Should you choose to have us design your corporate identity, we’ll present you with a number of preliminary options for your design, presented online, along with a detailed (and honest) commentary. We’ve found that this approach works for our clients: you have the opportunity to examine our work when you have the time to do so, not in the somewhat artificial atmosphere of a meeting. Also, by presenting a commentary alongside, we help our clients develop the visual language needed to
articulate what you want. After we’ve received feedback from you, we do what we call “lather, rinse, repeat”—we go through another pass to create something that truly represents you & your business ethos. This process continues until we’ve achieved what you want, usually taking three attempts to fine-tune a design. (An added bonus of this approach is that you can always retrace your steps in order to see how the process has developed over time.)
Working on the Website’s Appearance
At that point, we turn our focus to the website design. Depending upon the complexity of your needs, the work is split between two teams: design & programming development, who work in parallel to one another. At first you’ll have more interaction with the design team as we create a number of screenshots of how your website will look. Again, we present this online, along with a detailed commentary & you can look it over in your own time. Once again, we go through a “lather, rinse, repeat” cycle, where we zero in on a design that truly represents what you do. Like the design of a logo, this stage usually has only three iterations. Once a design has been chosen, we convert it to the language of the web, XHTML & CSS. We test our designs very thoroughly, over many different platforms & several browsers.
Programming & Testing
In the meantime, our programming team will will be creating your web application. As we mentioned above, we’ve asked you lots of questions about how your business works—be assured that we’ll ask for further clarifications.
Once the web application has reached a sufficient stage of maturity, we present it to you to see if it represents how you work.
And as with our XHTML & CSS work, we exhaustively test our development work—it’s simply built into the process from the very start. We provide documentation for our development work as well—always technical documentation for your site, but also “how to” documentation—it’s the best way to learn. Depending on the complexity of your web application, this may be built into the site itself or presented as a standalone document.