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Each client and project is different, so Spartan Yard‘s web design process—while well-defined—is not rigid. Some projects need more steps than others. Spartan Yard tailors a web development process for each client to create the best mix of value and results—the best process while providing growth within your means. Below is an outline of Spartan Yard‘s web design process:
Evaluation of Business Plan / Revenue Model
It is important that our staff understands your business and objectives. This evaluation gives Spartan Yard the chance to provide feedback on your plan and possibly suggest other revenue models that you may not have considered and to provide discussion on the ones that you have.
Competitive Web Analysis and Market Evaluation
Spartan Yard will go out and scour the marketplace to see what the competition is up to so we can learn from both their successes and mistakes. Spartan Yard will also perform due diligence and provide search metrics such as how many users may have queried any given search term for a particular period. This can provide invaluable insight into relative demand and demand trends for specific topics and phrases.
Marketing Plan Consideration
The dynamic and interactive nature of websites and web applications enables us to utilize the site itself to enhance marketing efforts (such as building in viral marketing features, focusing on search engine optimization, etc.) It would be malpractice for us to build the website in a vacuum without considering both internal and external marketing efforts. The line between marketing the site and the site itself is always blurred. Spartan Yard has successfully and will continue to provide clarity in this aspect.
Web Design Technical Discussion
Spartan Yard engineers will figure out the best technology to use for the project. Our team considers platform, scalability, browser requirements, the factoring in of any third-party systems or processes and a whole host of other variables which may interact with your new product. Once we have all the facts and requirements, as well as any requirements or concerns you may have, we‘ll propose the best technology and platform with which to build the project.
Creative Direction and Brand Development (if applicable)
The “look and feel” that you put forth to the general public is critical. The tone and connotations that the brand conveys can greatly impact the markets and demographics you‘ll appeal to. Spartan Yard understands that these statements are subjective in everyway. We‘ll discuss these factors, then create not only a solid brand, but all the collateral material and the overall creative direction by which Spartan Yard‘s design team will use as our ’guiding light‘ for everything that we do when it comes to design-related issues. The creative direction Spartan Yard will present to you primarily will be driven by statistics, user metrics and end user behavioral patterns.
Website Mockup Revisions
One of Spartan Yard‘s most unique offerings is that our mockup revision process is unlimited in nature. We will continue to create and revise mockups for your review until you say they are perfect and you approve them. There is no charge for additional mockups. We go through this process for the homepage and any related tier pages specified in the scope of work.
Sample Content Pages
Spartan Yard specializes in typography and using fonts and styles to get the most out of formatting text while maintaining web standards. We‘ll create a sample page with fake content, usually in Latin, just to serve as a template and inspiration for creating other content pages. This will provide a model for anyone tasked with developing content.
Web Production
This is the term used to describe the first part of the production process. Spartan Yard developers take the approved mockups and ’slice‘ them into a bunch of smaller images that we can then use to program the user interface and design. The result here is a one-page website with nothing on it—essentially, a custom template. This template is built with search engine optimization in mind as well as adhering to Section 508 and W3C guidelines (Spartan Yard does that as a matter of good practice—it‘s not something you pay extra for.)
Content Integration and SEO
As Spartan Yard developers migrate your content onto the pages, our team will work with you to enhance formatting and layout for maximum effectiveness. This is also the point where Spartan Yard spends a lot of time honing the pages for search engines. Our SEO process is extensive and our team is equipped with custom tools to provide several types of content density and keyword phrase focus analyses.
Functional Web Component Integration
Most of Spartan Yard projects involve functional, dynamic, or interactive components (in other words, pages that have more than just static text on them.) Typically programmers have been working on these modules and components since the outset of the project, and now it‘s time to merge them into the rest of your website and test them in place and with relation to any associated modules or functions.
Quality Control and Testing
Everything Spartan Yard does from conception is built on a staging server (which we provide) so that you can see our progress in real time and make any comments or provide feedback at any point. This also gives our team a chance to stage the site on a live web server and in many instances providing a guide as to what to expect once the new environment is made public. Such environmental issues our team will watch for are how the server behaves under usage stress, bandwidth allocation, security and so much more.
Once Spartan Yard has done our own internal review and quality check, our team will present the site to you for the same. Our team will address any issues or concerns, and end up with a site that is ready to go live.
Once everyone is content that the site is ready to go live, Spartan Yard will set up your hosting (as applicable), prepare the server (as applicable), and deploy the site. Our team will handle all of this for you so that you need not get your hands dirty with the technical details. We of course do one last quality check to make sure that everything migrated over to the live server without incident. If there are any administration interfaces or ’dashboards‘ that you will use to manage parts of the site, our team also demonstrates and trains you on those (though this usually happens back in the production phase.)
On top of technical support maintenance, Spartan Yard can also play an active and ongoing role in constantly monitoring site performance, environmental stability, traffic, trends, and other analytics. We track the data, provide the reports, and most importantly, we‘ll analyze the data for you, tell you what it means, and what we think you should do about it Unlike most consultants, not only can we suggest what changes should be made based on the data, but we can actually implement them for you—whether we‘re talking about an interface tweak, a new feature addition, or even unrelated marketing efforts (such as print, media buys, PR, etc.), Spartan Yard has the in-house resources and close relationships to support, enhance, and market your website and business in general.
Do you have a question? Check out Spartan Yard’s Service FAQs!