Our Design and Development Process

It is very important that the site design be well thought out in advance.  A poorly laid out site can cause problems on multiple levels by not providing your visitors with reasonable paths to find what they are looking for, and can be costly to repair later. 

Our normal process involves starting with a no obligation discussion of what your needs are. During this phase we will ask about your business, your company style and image, and the primary purpose of your website. 

Basic Site Information

We will look to establish certain specifics such as:

• Audience (Primary and secondary audience)
• Competition (Local, national, international, brick and mortar...)
• Traffic sources (Search engines, offline marketing, affiliates...)
• Strategies (How do you expect to differentiate yourself from the rest of the hoard?)
• Metrics (How do you see defining success for your website?)

Content

Next we will discuss the message that you will want to provide your visitors.  Will you create your content?  How will you maintain it?  Will you seek to have visitors add content?  Will you be receiving content from other sites through things like RSS feeds etc.

We also need to establish how that content will be organized on the site, and if that organization will allow your visitors to locate what they are looking for.  Is the organization intuitive for new or casual users?

Revenue Generation

Another important topic will be if you are expecting to generate revenue from your site, and how you expect to do so.  Options include e-commerce, membership and paid content, self managed advertizing, externally generated advertizing (Adsense, Yahoo), affiliate marketing, or some other concept.

Functionality

Lastly is the question of functionality.  Do you want to include blogs, calendars, external feeds, storefronts, links to paypal, form mailers, flash components, or other specialty components. 

Project Documentation and Budgeting

At this point, we should be able to give you a ballpark figure of what to expect based on what you have as a budget.  In some cases, this may include options.  Cost/functionality selection may allow the use of either more simple functions, or fewer more complex ones.

We now produce a document that describes the overall site map and functionality that will be made available.  You may be provided with either a page mockup, or a series of page design slides to show what we see the site looking like.  We will also discuss your time frame expected to completion, and what the responsibilities of both parties are with regards to items such as stock images, URL, hosting, and content. 

Additional Services

No small shop has every skill possible in house, we have aligned ourselves with a network of people with whom we exchange work.  This provides the customer with the most complete set of talent available for the price.  When outsourcing a component is necessary, RWD uses only resources that have a proven track record at getting things done on time and within budget.