Website Design & Development Process

DNA Process… Rockpoint Media follows a process for designing and developing websites. The following steps assures that the clients business is fully understood prior to building their website.

• Goals/understanding of the business
  • Probably the most important step is understanding the goals. Without goals there is no direction. Typically this is a brainstorming session. Simply put, to understand the business’s DNA. The practice is an effort to sum up what makes the clients business tick and to learn what is important to them.

• Flow Chart
  • A flowchart is a type of diagram that represents a workflow or process. This steps allows us to determine the blocks or pages that will exist on the website.

• SEO Keyword analysis/Geographics
  • It’s imperative that your website possesses keyword specific to your products and services as well as the businesses geographics if you want to show up in search engine results. Beginning the analysis at this step allows us to collect and incorporate keywords and phrases throughout the website build.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.Keywords and geographical locations are injected into the content of the pages, the image metadata as well as meta tags that live inside the code of a website only visible to search engines. It’s how humans tell search engines what a website is all about so they know how to index you in their search engine results page.

• Clients Responsibilities / Content i.e. Text / Images / Business related info such as services and products. About info, Contact info, Technical needs
  • With keywords determined, content writing can begin. Typically, the client writes the first draft and we work together to fine tune it. The client also provides any images they would like such as products, services and about photos. Any technical info such as databases, domains, contact forms will get ironed out at this stage.

• Design Mockups/Concept – what does the client already like or envision
  • At this point we are ready to work on the design/layout of the website. Sometimes the client already has a vision or points out parts of another websites they like and wish to incorporate it into their design. That is the base and we build off that. Once we have a clear vision the mockups begin. This give the client time to focus on content while we build out design concepts.

• Phase 1 Development/coding
  • Once the client has agreed to a design, development begins.

• Review Phase 1
  • Once I feel there is a good base conceptual design, I will share progress of the website with the client by providing a private link to view it. This is the clients opportunity to provide feedback.

• Phase 2 Development/coding
  • Phase 2 is implementing review cycle 1.

• Review Phase 2
  • Sometimes there is a 3rd review cycle but typically 2 does the trick.

• Meta data
  • Remember SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? At this point we have all of our keywords and phrases as well as geographical information. Now we can add this to our metadata code so that search engines know what the heck this website is all about.

• Go Live
  • In the industry, when a website is finally published to the public on the internet, we refer to it as going live! Typically in a couple weeks the search engines will index the site so that it is able to be found when people search for the products or services on the internet.