Website Development

Before building or updating any website it is essential to establish the business and technical requirements. This is the driving force that the Information Architecture, Graphic Design, and Functionality must answer to. The requirements document records your goals and needs for your website, while distilling the essential elements from those that would be nice to have.

Information Architecture

This phase determines the structure of your website. Just like the architectural drawing for a building shows how to build the physical structure, the informational architecture is a map of your website's information down to the page level. Simple sites can document this with 4-8 hours of collaborative work – sometimes less. Complex sites or many revisions may increase the cost accordingly.

Sitemap

We begin by creating an outline of the information that should be on your website and organize it into distinct pages and categories. This diagram shows each page in your website, and how each is related to the other pages on your website.

Functional Templates

The next step is to create a diagram of all of the elements on each page in your website. This does not necessarily reflect the placement of the information, but will determine the main content of each page on the website, as well as any related cross-selling, promotional, or additional elements that are suitable.

Design

The graphic design process can be as simple as choosing an existing template and customizing colors, or as complex as a highly customized design. It's important to establish your design needs, as significant rearranging of an existing template can easily reach the cost of a custom design. For a simple website with a home page and child page layout (2 tiers), which accommodates all pages in the website, 4 – 8 hours of design will suffice.

Content Authoring

This is the most client intensive aspect of website development. Each page of your website needs content – the information you want to give to your customers. You know your industry best, so you are often the best person to write the content. This process can begin as soon as the sitemap and functional templates are confirmed. With a Content Management System (highly recommended!) you can enter this content directly into your website as soon as the pages are built out. As the font styles, content layout, and other design elements are created, your content will be automatically included in the living site.

Build

With the technical requirements, information architecture and design in place, your website can be built! This takes a developer anywhere from a few days for small sites, to several months for more complex sites. The amount of time required depends primarily on the complexity of the functionality requirements. A small site using little custom functionality can be built with 8-16 hours effort. QA and final tweaks usually take the same amount of time as the initial build.