Published on 06/21/2007

This article demonstrates the process we take you through when you ask Artemis Media to design and develop your website. It's not always an easy process and we beleive it is similar to building a house, so we have designed the steps in the process in that vein. It makes life so much easier when you know what to expect of a good developer. Have a read and if you have any questions feel free to contact us.

Steps in Website Development

Developing a website, It’s like a Partnership – “You and us”

We take pride in working closely with our clients to ensure they finish up with a website that matches their need, is highly functional, looks good, and gets you known on the Internet. Out there in the World Wide Web you have to compete against all the other websites (around 380 billion of them) so simply having a presence in the web is not enough. Working closely with you and your team we find out about your business and advise you on Internet and marketing strategies.

Out there in the World Wide Web you have to compete against all the other websites (around 380 billion of them) so simply having a presence in the web is not enough. Working closely with you and your team we find out about your business and advise you on Internet and marketing strategies.

How do we do that?

The website is just another tool in your box for winning business. Having said that, it can be a massive tool in your tool box and bring in excellent returns, but only a few manage that overnight. The rest of us have to work for it in much the same way as you would if you opened an office or shop on the high street. Having sorted out your objectives and priorities we then get down to the task of working out what you want the site to do and how you want it to feel and look. It’s a bit like building a house and the steps in the process are: -

Building the foundations

Use the web to see what you like and what you don’t like
From this we can then define your website’s main pages, its colours, look and feel, where navigation bars will be and how your clients will work their way around the site
Work out what the site should be called and set its domain name
Establish what critical messages you want to get over and your USP (unique selling point)
If you are service based – what will we do to make sure that your visitors get in touch
If you are selling product on line, what the catalogue and shop will look like and how will the customer pay for the goods etc
Agree the size of your website (e.g. small – 5 to 10 pages; medium – up to 50 pages or large – 100 plus pages)
Establish timescales for going live and what you will have to provide for us to do our job (the material to populate your web pages - images, words, brochures, leaflets etc)
Discuss the scale and style of graphic design and establish whether you want our standard service, or our more expensive premium graphic art design service.
Work out what database functions you will need, from lists of email clients for sending newsletter to – or for sales processing and order tracking.
Whether you want to use Straw Poling to take soundings from clients about goods or services and marketing information
Whether you want to create a quiz to entertain and inform.

Building the shell and fitting the contents

First Fix – Building the shell

Once we have the basics sorted out our graphic designers can then get on with creating the look and feel of the website and our programmers can organise databases and functionality ready for a first “walk through” with you. Once that is all agreed and you are happy with the way it all works we can then move on to setting everything up and testing it.

Second Fix – fitting the contents

Once everything works properly, the look and feel are right and the content has been received from you we can finalise population of the pages and where applicable the shop and databases.

Review

Its now time to review the work and if you require any changes or to programme them into our work schedules; you may be asked to review the work again before we put the finishing touches to the site.

Training

We will then arrange a couple of training days where we can teach you how to make changes to the web page content. This is essential if you are to keep your website fresh and interesting so that visitors keep coming back to your site. You don’t need to know anything about programming as our content management system does it all for you. All you need to know is how to inset new items like photo’s, articles, product information, service information, success stories etc. Once you have had some training you can do all this for yourself, so you will save money in not having to pay us to do it for you.

If you are not sure how to do something we are at the end of the phone, email or Instant Messager to talk you through the process.

Commissioning

Once we have completed all our design and development work it is time to commission the website. We will make it “live” so the world can see it, inform the main search engines of your new website and then we get stuck onto the marketing side of our service. But from this moment on your website is live and ready to “trade”.

After sales service and maintenance

Optimisation

All our design packages include search engine optimisation for a short period. This service will address the content of your main web pages and make sure that the way they are worded is friendly to how search engines categorise and list pages for directories.

A well optimised page can help you achieve better page ranking with engine like Google, Ask, Yahoo and others.

Search engines send out what we call “bots”, an electronic robot that will do a crawl of web pages on the Internet. The robot will look at your page content, see if it matches you page’s key words and phrases, checks to see if you are not using any illegal programming techniques, and assess the value of the information on each page it visits. A badly optimised page will either be poorly categorised by the robot or missed altogether and this means that anyone searching a directory for your product or service is unlikely to find your site in the search results. So, a well optimised site ensures that the robots can find what they need easily and quickly.

Link Building

Another factor in the decision as to whether your website is considered interesting and important enough to display in search results and to award a page rank is in the number of websites that link to your website.

The more links you have to your website the more important it is deemed to be. Again within our packages we include the setting up of inbound links to your website so that you can quickly gain prominence. Link building and Search Engine Optimisation are ongoing tasks and you may want to consider taking our service for this.

Additional Services that you may wish to consider

Email Marketing

Email marketing has become a dirty word over the years due to the huge amount of spam generated by half a dozen rogues and criminals. The fact of the matter is that email marketing is a highly efficient and effective way of keeping you existing clients informed about new products or services, success stories and information which may be of benefit to them.

Email marketing takes the place of leaflet or brochure postings and cost a lot less; it’s also more eco-friendly, as you done have to produce all that junk mail material and post it out by snail mail. This alone could save a rain forest or two over the years.

Here are some of the areas of business that email marketing can help you with and speed up your responses to clients by automating any number of the tasks.

Sending out newsletters to existing clients automatically
Sending out newsletters to prospective clients that have expressed an interest in you products or services automatically
Automatically send out targeted email messages to inform potential new clients of your company’s products or services (with an opt out button so they can tell you they don’t want any more emails from you)
Order tracking
Automatic responses to New Orders, New Subscribers, New Customers all of which saves you time and money
Auto send promotions

Look at the cost comparisons between traditional methods of marketing and email marketing. Below we can see a table which gives the return on capital for every dollar spent. The source of the information is the Direct Marketing Association (USA).

Marketing Method: $ Return on investment

Traditional Marketing 7.20

On-Line Marketing 21.08

Email Marketing 51.45

As we can see from the above comparisons - Email marketing is one of the most productive methods of modern marketing and for these who implement it properly and professionally it provides far better returns on capital invested than other traditional forms of marketing.

Email Marketing is not included in hosting and design packages as not everyone wants to take this option. It is available to everyone as an additional service.

N.B. We have a very strong anti-spam policy and will not allow any email marketing user to spam. Spamming could get the service withdrawn.

To find out more visit our main website at the Cumbria Business Portal