Websites

We make beautiful, functional websites, uniquely designed to help our clients meet their business goals. All our websites are built on Expose – our hassle-free content management system – which makes it super easy for marketing teams to keep content fresh without calling on IT for assistance.

Scoping & Research

Digital moves fast. Goals and capabilities should be aligned from the outset. Scoping is all about getting under the skin of a new website and figuring out what it can do for you. We start by investigating how your business operates and develop a blueprint, designed to provide a return on investment based on your market, your competitors and your peers. With a deep understanding of your interactions, we can enhance the relationships you have with your customers, thereby increasing your brand value and – ultimately – your bottom line.

Content

Content is everything. It’s the reason a website exists at all. Design should follow content – not the other way around. Imagine a website is the vessel that surrounds its content, not simply a bunch of ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text that needs filling in with real copy at a later date. Whether you decide to use our in-house copywriting services or BYOC (bring your own copy), we’ll compile a complete inventory and perform thorough analysis to give you valuable insights into the words you have and the words you need.

Wireframing

Before any design happens, we’ll wireframe your new website for us to review together. Wireframes are lo-fi layouts that are easy to change – we take your content and arrange it in a way that works on the web. Applying everything we learned at the scoping phase, we structure the website so it pre-empts the needs of visitors, presenting them with information as they think of it. Wireframes ensure the next steps happen based on a known quantity – whatever we design will be geared towards meeting your business objectives.

Tech Specs

Technical specifications are the bridge between wireframes and web development. They describe the functionality and interactions a website has with its visitors. We often carry out ‘user stories’ – micro narratives designed to play out if the site has been built correctly. Each story has requirements for our developers, telling them exactly what to build. The technical specification forms a manual for developing the website, ensuring what we will build and what you are expecting are one and the same. It contains technical details for our development team, helping you visualise what each section of the site is required to do and what your customers will experience.

User Experience Design

Websites are interactive and therefore must be flexible. A website is experienced across many devices – smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs, even games consoles. It should always present a positive reflection of your company, whatever the platform. It’s not enough to be “cool” or “pretty” – your site also needs to convert visitors into paying customers. We typically start with the homepage, then – once the general look and feel is defined – roll the design across the rest of the site. We use InVision to sign off prototypes and gather feedback from stakeholders at both ends – try it for yourself. It’s quick, intuitive and fun. We never begin development until you’re completely happy with the designs.

Development

Once the content, design and technical specifications are all agreed upon, your website enters the web development stage. Our web developers are divided into front-end and back-end teams – one creates visually stunning user-experiences, the other orchestrates all the behind-the-scenes magic that powers them. By this stage, there shouldn’t be any unknown variables – the output will match everything that’s been signed off. Animations and interactions are also created during this phase, as well as breakpoints that make a website responsive so it works on multiple devices and screen sizes.

Technical SEO

There are two sides to search engine optimisation – one focusses primarily on content marketing; the other is concerned with on-page, technical items that determine how Google, Bing and other search engines decide how to rank your website. Factors such as code structure, metadata, rich schema markup and sitemaps are areas we cover as part of every website build. They’re designed to give your new website the best start in life as far as search engine visibility is concerned.

Quality Assurance

Before you experience your new website in the flesh, our quality assurance team will run through it with a fine-toothed comb. We make sure everything is as it should be, checking for simple errors such as spelling mistakes to more complex ones like mobile compatibility or browser bugs in specific versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome and so on. We’ll also make sure the administration side functions as you’d expect, so you can seamlessly add, edit and remove content on a day-to-day basis.

Hosting

We host the vast majority of websites we produce for clients ourselves. As a trusted Amazon Web Services partner, we have a tried, tested and scalable solution for your website to live in the cloud. Choosing our hosting platform means iterative changes can easily be published to your site without delay. We use content delivery networks to make sure your website stays fast, sharp and snappy – it doesn’t matter how many people are using it simultaneously.

Launch

Once your website has passed quality assurance and all content has been uploaded or migrated (we usually do this collaboratively so you know how your new website works), then we’re ready for launch! We’ll help with all aspects of transitioning DNS and liaising with the right people at your end to get the site online smoothly and with zero downtime. If you’d like us to promote the launch of your new website we can do this too – take a look at the marketing services we offer around strategy, outreach and social.