Based on our experience directly and indirectly with our clients, we have developed a purposeful and methodical approach to building high quality websites. These procedures insure a smooth and successful ride through the course of your website’s development. We accomplish this by dividing your project into phases:
Phase 1 – The Pre-Project Stuff
To begin a project you can choose one of two approaches:
- If you have general questions or are unclear about our process, what you can expect, turn around times, etc. call or email Cecil and he’ll make sure we are on the same page
- Complete our project planner here
We offer up to 30 minutes of pre-project communications and consulting before billing begins (please see our pricing page for an explanation of how we charge). This time will be much more valuable to you if you first submit a planner.
Phase 2 – Proposal and Cost Estimates
Once we have produced our estimate from your project planner you now can make an informed decision about whether or not our offer is something you are comfortable moving forward with. If not we understand, no hard feelings here. Proposals and design quotes are always free of charge when you complete a project planner.
Phase 3 – Contract
Once you approve our proposal or quote, we’ll draft the project contract and send it your way to make it official.
After we’ve received the signed contract and the initial deposit (usually 50% of the project’s estimated cost), we begin creating your website. We’ll also grant you access to our project management system where you’ll be able to follow the progress of your website every step of the way so you always know what’s going on and what’s happening next.
Phase 4 – Project Organization, and Defining the Project
This is the kickoff phase. In this step, we’ll put your goals and requirements on paper (scoping document) so we can tangibly see the scope of the project and keep the project costs within budget. You’ll then approve the scoping document before we move onto the next step.
We’ll begin to gather more information about your audience and industry, your administrative or “backend” needs for the website, as well as gathering your content and assets to populate the website. By gathering and then analyzing the material you’ve provided, we establish whether we have all the necessary elements, and whether some of them need upgrading, improving or even making from scratch.
Also, in this phase we’ll be asking you a variety of questions related to the look and feel of your site and creating the sitemap for the site’s architecture or navigation structure.
Phase 5 – Sketch & Visualize
Here, we will review the project goals and begin to creatively brainstorm ideas, sketch paper prototypes and create wire-frames to produce a rough concept of the website. We’ll then present our rough design direction to you and gather your feedback to revise, refine and focus it.
Phase 6 – Visual Design
Here’s where we’ll begin the actual creation of your website’s visual design. Drawing from our inspiration and visualization in the previous phase, and still keeping the goals we set top of mind, we’ll craft some pixel perfect goodness and present you with what we’ve created. Once you’ve reviewed it, we’ll polish and tweak the design based on your feedback to get it just right.
Phase 7 – Integration, Programming & QA
Once the visual design has been finalized and approved we begin the production phase. As you sit back and relax, we here at Firestorm will be strapping on our ninja masks and katanas as we get to work on the coding and programming of your website.
Using a skillfully executed mixture of (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, and plenty of other fancy-schmancy sounding acronyms, we throw down a killer layer of bullet proof code that, when viewed on your monitor (and in any modern browser), displays a gorgeous and superbly-functioning website.
We’ll keep in close contact with you via our project management system during this stage–providing you with updates, asking you questions, and perhapseven giving you occasional sneak peaks at how things are coming along.
Phase 8 – Test, analyze & Refine
Once we’ve completed the coding of your website and our internal quality checks, we’ll ask you to go through the entire test site and Beta test it to let us know if there are any tweaks or changes you’d like made. Though quite rare, errors, bugs or omissions caused by us do occasionally happen–and this is the time when we’ll fix those right up at no cost to you.
If you planned ahead and communicated clearly during the course of the project, you’ll probably have very few requests for us at this stage. (Please make sure you review our pricing page for tips about keeping costs down.)
We test, revise, and refine until you’re thrilled with the product.
Phase 9 – Launch!
Finally! The moment every site owner LOVES! After receiving final payment for your website project, we launch your site!
Phase 10 – Promotion & Maintenance
Now that your site is launched and live doesn’t mean we’re done – we’ve only just begun actually. Now we have to keep your site looking awesome and it’s content fresh and up to date. We also have to promote the site and market it to the search engines not to mention get it in front of your target audience so that it’s a success. This process, when executed online, is called search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) and we have the know how and skills to help you with that too.
