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OUTSOURCE Web Design can assist with all your Website Designing, Hosting, Maintenance and Management needs. Website Design has a number of essential steps that must be done in the right sequence to ensure your move on-line is successful.
Once appointed one of our Web Design Consultants will call you to clearly specify and determine the break up of duties required, desired timeline and agreed responsibilities for both the Client and our Web Design team.
The 12 essential steps consist of the following:
Evaluate
Is a website suitable for your business?
First you need to determine if you are likely to get a return on the work and money needed to produce an effective website.
Who is the target audience? Are they using the Internet? Will they in the future? Are similar businesses benefiting? What are your competitors doing?
One source of information is to conduct some Internet searches using various keywords related to your business. Nine MSN is particularly useful for it's Australian focus, while Google is currently the most popular international search engine.
Goals
How does a website fit with your overall marketing plans? What do you want to achieve with a website? Create more reach into the market place? Sell product? Deliver detailed information into the hands of your customers? Pre-sales? Technical support?
Customer support? Product catalogue?
Portfolio?
Plan
As in any business endeavour, a considered step-by-step approach will most likely achieve the best results. We have all heard the horror stories of businesses spending ten's of thousands of dollars to create websites that failed miserably. But little is said about the many small-medium enterprises that have taken a less foolhardy approach, and are quietly building effective online strategies. An effective first website does not have to cost a fortune.
Functional Specification
Based on the outcome of the preceding steps, the next step is to specify exactly what the site will do and the particular technologies that will be employed in the construction of the website. For simple sites this may take the form of a outlining the structure of the site, with the number of pages and nominating what content will go on which pages. For highly complex sites, it would take the form of a document specifying each page of the site in detail, and how each page is to operate. Server requirements would be detailed, along with any special components needed, the particular scripting language(s) to be employed, and so on. Agreement must be reached that the Functional Specification fully and accurately describes the proposed website before proceeding with further steps. This document forms the basis upon which client acceptance testing is conducted later.
Cost Estimates/Quotation
Only at this stage can a realistic estimation of required effort and cost be made. Attempting to do this with out the previous steps is likely to result in wrong expectations, budget over-runs.
Register Domain Name
Australian domain names (.com.au) have very strict eligibility requirements, whereas International domain names (.com) do not. However, in most cases we would recommend trying to secure registration of your Australian domain name. You can register your domain name yourself, or as is often the case, we can do it on your behalf.
Create the Website
a) Graphic Design At this step, the look and feel of the site is designed to capture your business branding and align with your visitor’s expectations. It is usual to get client sign-off on the graphic design before proceeding further.
b) Content Creation This is where the actual words and images that go on the pages are put together. Usually this is your job. You know your business best. You can explain it best. The web developers role here is usually to offer advise on the break-up of content, amount per page, and so on. Where large amounts of similar information are to be compiled, the web developer would usually supply a template to facilitate the task.
c) Site Build Construction of the web pages and the navigation system - usually occurs in parallel to content creation.
d) Content Load Up until now the site has been populated with dummy data. At this stage, your information is placed on the pages, or loaded to the database. It is here that the final layout of each web page is finalised with any fine-tuning required to produce the best presentation.
e) Web Developer-Testing Functionality testing to ensure all was built according to the Functional Specification and works, as it should.
f) Client Acceptance Testing You thoroughly inspect the site. Does the site do what you set out to do? Does it meet your expectations? If not, did the web developer fall down by failing to meet the Functional Specification, or are there further requirements that have come up?
Hosting
Hosting for the web site needs to be organised so that it can be accessed over the Internet. OUTSOURCE Web Design team offer hosting services for convenience or you may wish to organise this yourself independently. If you are organising the hosting yourself, care must be taken to ensure that the particular hosting provider supplies all the necessary software and functionality on the server for the website to operate properly.
Domain Name Delegation
The domain name, which was registered in step 6, must now be configured to direct to your web site.
E-mail Set-up
Often new email addresses have been set up during the construction of the site. The computers belonging to the people to whom these email addresses belong need to be configured to download their email. This step normally would mark the completion of a web site build project. The steps below would usually be part of a separate agreement should it be planned that they be carried out by your web development company.
Site Maintenance
Website content must be kept fresh and up-to-date. However, consideration of the on-going maintenance of the site is often neglected in the rush to get a site live. In the past, site maintenance was conducted either by the web development company (under a separate site maintenance agreement), or by people within the organisation who have been trained in basic web publishing skills. More commonly now-a-days, easy to use content management systems are incorporated in the site, which allow employees with no web skills to perform site maintenance. One such system is Page Editor, which provides a particularly cost-effective solution.
Site Promotion
Once your site is live on the Internet, people must be made aware it is there. Effective methods of site promotion include:
a) Printed Material/Advertisements An often-overlooked area - ensure your web site's address is included on all your business stationery, and in all your advertising.
b) Search Engine Listings Search Engines are the place people turn to when looking for information on a specific subject. Having your site correctly listed in the right search engines can be a very good source of quality traffic to your site.
c) E-mail Lists Similar to postal mailing lists, but far less expensive.
