Website Design & Hosting: How we work

We are often asked what level of involvement the customer has in the design and build of the website and its ongoing maintenance.  Of course, every site build is different however, in general the design and build of your website can be broken down into the following 7 steps:

Step 1: Determine the purpose of your site

A website is certainly necessary for credibility in today's marketplace but what is the 'call to action' when you attract visitors.  Is the site intended as corporate brochure displaying brand identity and company information? Is it an e-commerce site driving sales? Is it a content site building interest in your products or services and generating inbound leads?

Step 2: Choose the style and basic layout

This will depend largely on the image you want your site to portray and the type of visitors are you hoping to attract. Do you want a classic corporate feel or something more friendly and approachable. You may already have a very clear idea or you may need some inspiration.  We have literally thousands of basic design buidling blocks categorised to enable us to quickly come up with an outline design that suits your business needs. 

The samples below give an idea of the starting point:

Step 3: Decide on the scope

This step involves planning a sitemap.  How many pages will initially be required? how will they be linked? Will products be sold directly from the site? What additional capabilities are required (site searching, contact forms, site analytics etc). During this stage we will also register a domain name for you and decide on one of the hosting options.

Step 4: Build and fine tune a mock-up

Once we have an understanding of the purpose and image of the site we will build a mock-up that we can use to jointly work on the detail of the site: build a unique layout, decide on the images that will be used and agree on the content that will need to be written up. For e-commerce sites we will work with you on building a shopping cart and secure payment methods.

Step 5: Decide how changes/updates are made to the site

The majority of websites have product and pricing information that needs to be updated frequently. For a small monthly fee we provide access to our designers who would be happy to make these changes for you.  Alternatively we can give you direct access to the site content via a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS enables you to log onto the site as a content administrator and, in a simple to use interface, make changes to content/images and build new pages.  Although you type into a MSWord-like interface, when you hit 'apply' your website styling is automatically applied for you.  We will, of course, provide you with training on the CMS if required.

Step 6: Review of final design

Before going live we will build the site on our test systems enabling you to browse your site and make any final changes.

Step 7: Go live!

Once you are comfortable, we transfer to our production servers and the site becomes live on your domain name.


That's it!  Depending on your requirements we can get you up and running with your own site in a couple of weeks.  For larger more complex sites the timing is largely determined by how quickly you can generate the content required.

We are of course missing one more critical step:

Step 8: Monitor and measure performance goals

This is discussed in detail in the Internet Marketing pages.

We would be pleased to hear from you.  Contact us either by phone or online and to find out how we can help with your internet presence.