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.
In the past, we would then produce a specifications document—essentially a blueprint of the programming that we’ll do for you. Whilst this may sound reasonable, we found that by the time a project neared completion, the clients’ needs had changed radically—meaning that we’d have to go back & re-engineer a lot of our code.
These days, we recommend a different, “agile” approach to web development where we develop the site in tandem with your specifications. This creates a far more rapid, productive development & helps us react far faster to your changing demands.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Whether we’re creating your corporate identity or developing a web application, we follow a similar process. We’ll present you your work-in-progress online, along with a detailed (and honest) commentary. This streamlines the whole process: 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.
After we’ve received feedback from you, we do what we call “lather, rinse, repeat”—we go through another pass. This process continues until we’ve achieved something that truly represents you & your business. 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
If we’ve been designing your corporate identity, we then turn our attention to your 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, going through the “lather, rinse, repeat” cycle, until 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 turn to the creation of your web application. As we mentioned above, we’ve asked you lots of questions about how your business works—you’ll also be along for the ride in this stage. 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.
