# Our website process

Building a website is a collaborative effort that we organise into three distinct phases, with each one being led by a dedicated member of the team.

## Information architecture

This typically involves the following activities:

- **Consultation**: Understanding your organisation by reviewing strategic documents, analysing analytics and other data, speaking to staff and looking at peers and competitors.
- **Audience research**: Working with you to identify key audience groups, conducting interviews and developing an understanding of their motivation, behaviour, and information needs.
- **Data structure and site maps**: Designing a new structure for your website, including navigation, content types, taxonomies and other useful organising principles.
- **Wireframes and prototyping**: Visualising page layouts and basic interactions and establishing a hierarchy of content that balances the requirements of your different audiences.
- **Workshops**: Presenting our ideas and collecting your feedback to help us to refine our approach. We’ll outline various options and work together to clarify all of the finer details.
- **User involvement**: Testing our ideas with users using activities and tools such as card-sorts, tree tests and prototypes. Insights are used to help us refine our ideas.
- **Functional specification:** The key deliverable for this phase. We’ll provide a detailed document that contains the data structure, site maps and wireframes that specify your new website.

## Design

This typically involves the following activities:

- **Creative brief**: Documenting an agreed approach for the design that includes relevant research insights and information about existing conventions such as style and brand guidelines.
- **Exploration**: Creating designs for a small set of pages and components that broadly represent your website. We’ll present to key decision-makers and seek feedback for further refinement.
- **Components and layouts**: Once the visual approach has been agreed, we produce designs that span a broad range of website components, blocks and templates, at mobile and desktop widths.
- **User involvement**: Testing visuals or layouts with users to identify areas of confusion or opportunities for improvement. Testing can take place with flat designs or interactive prototypes.

## Development

This typically involves the following activities:

- **Server and CMS setup:** Creating a staging environment, deploying the WordPress content management system and content types and taxonomies based on the agreed data structure.
- **Block development**: Rendering the agreed designs in HTML and CSS and integrating with the WordPress code. We then configure interactive elements such as menus, modals and accordions.
- **Browser testing**: Testing the code across a set of supported browsers and a range of mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Browser specific fallback options are implemented as needed.
- **Handover & training**: Handing the website over to you for ‘user acceptance testing’. We’ll provide you with a full training session supplemented by remote telephone support.
- **User involvement**: Conducting a final round of user testing on a staging website to identify usability issues or refinement opportunities that can be addressed prior to launch.
- **Launch**: Transferring the domain name to our server, setting-up redirects, configuring analytics and monitoring site performance carefully during the first few days.

## Project management

Our approach is based on carefully documented processes and clear milestones. It incorporates the following elements:

- A written brief
- Budget & schedule updates
- A dedicated project team & project manager
- A risk log
- Confidentiality agreements (where required)

Projects may require careful stakeholder consultation and management, We’ll work with you to identify who the key decision-makers are and ensure they are appropriately engaged.

We employ a variety of tools to support our project management including [Trello](https://trello.com/) for collaboration.