Custom Website Design & Development
Wide Media builds websites to a broad range of briefs and budgets, across varying industries and business sizes. Whether you need a small promotional site to launch a product or a fully scalable enterprise solution - Wide Media has the experience, expertise and resources to deliver great results.
Web design deals with the information architecture, user interface as well as the look and feel of a website. This is the aspect of the website that the customer gets to interact with.
Web development deals with the programming code that goes on behind the scenes, and creates the features that are seen by the end user.
In a standard commerical website the following process in building a site usually applies.
1 - Planning
Setting out strategic objectives and mapping out how the site will work. This includes creating a site map.
2 - Wireframes
Designing the information architecture and how the user interface will work. This is like a sketch of the pages, illustrating what goes where.
3 - Graphic Design
After wireframes are agreed upon, the design proccess begins based upon these. The designers will create how the site will look when finnished. This is done as a flat image so it is easy to make changes before it is put into code.
4 - HTML/CSS
On approval the designs will be taken by the developers and put into HTML using CSS.
5 - CMS/E-commerce integration
If the site involves a CMS or E-Commerce framework the HTML/CSS will be implemented into the framework and any custom programming (eg CRM intergration) that is required is also done at this stage.
6 - System Training & Content Population
If the site involves a CMS or E-Commerce framework the client will then be trained on the system prior to content population. For large sites we reccomend the client spend a day with Wide Media populating content to further familiarise themselves with the system as well puting concentrated start. Usually it is more cost effective for the client to populate the reamining content to the site (depending upon size)
For small static sites (no CMS or E-commerce) often the designers will design each individual page making steps 5 & 6 unnecessary.
7 - Test and launch!
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A few things that should be considered with web design:
Brand Mesage – needs to display your identity and unique selling proposition, to ensure customer retention.
Marketing – great web design is a powerful marketing tool. You need to direct the actions of your visitors, so that they take the actions that build your business. Your content should be persuasive and attention grabbing. Your content should also be optimised for the search engines in order to bring in lots of free traffic.
Useability - A website needs to be attractive, but not at the cost of useability.