The Development Process for Projects

A successful website development project starts with careful planning. There a procedure to ensure that the project moves through its various stages smoothly.

Project Questionnaire

Before our first meeting, Pixel Pirate requests that you complete the Project Questionnaire. Completing this Questionnaire helps Pixel Pirate to get a better idea of the look, the scope and the objectives of your website.

Understanding Your Business

Understanding your business and your brand is the critical first step. We work with you to clearly understand your current needs and long-term goals. It is at this stage that we also outline the initial schedule and budget.

Develop a Technical Brief

It is very important that the technical aspects of your website are determined and understand the technological requirements of your site. This involves determining:

• The hosting environment: What hosting environment best suits the technical requirements of the site.

• Content Management System (CMS): Do you want a CMS so that you can manage your content updates internally, or do you want Pixel Pirate to do the ongoing website maintenance? The selection of a CMS will be largely determined by the hosting environment.

• Forms: Will there be information-gathering or other types of forms on the site, and how will the data from the forms be handled?

Information Architecture & Site Map

Once the technical brief is developed, Pixel Pirate works with you to identify all the content to be present at launch of the new website, and work with you to determine how to most effectively present that information to the end-user. Once the information architecture is developed, we develop a site map and a wireframe of your site. Revisions are made to the site map or wireframe until a final site architecture is agreed upon.

Integrating SEO into Your Website's Structure

When determining the structure of the website, we take into account the keywords and key phrases that your company considers "high value" — terms that when searched will return your site on the Search Engine Results Page, hopefully on the first page. By determining your high-value keywords/phrases, Pixel Pirate can integrate these high-value keywords into your websites directory and file-naming.

Pixel Pirate uses best practices when coding websites, utilizing Web Standards as developed by the W3C. We ensure that your website is easily and accurately indexed by search engines. This may sound a bit technical, but it's a crucial detail in optimizing your website for the search engines.

Develop a Creative Brief

Using the questionnaire as a starting point, we fine tune your design requirements — what other websites do you like or dislike, and why? What sort of page layout do you prefer? Do you have an existing color palette for your brand or do you wish to have one created?

The outcome of this process is a detailed Creative Brief which is handed off to outsource designers [or] by me who, guided by the brief, create the first round of designs for consideration. These designs are then revised through feedback from the client's decision maker until designs are finalized.

Implementation & Testing

We now do the coding and programming for the site. Once the site is built, we upload the files to the test site and commence tests for useability, cross-platform issues, and functionality. Any problems or issues are identified and solutions determined.

Launch & Follow-up

Once all Quality Assurance issues are resolved, we put the site online at the specified URL. The site is registered with the major search engines. Site performance is monitored closely.