Ordering a website can be both an exciting and a nervous step. Exciting as it opens up a world of opportunities for your business, and nervous because most business owners are quite far from understanding all the technicalities involved in the website development process.
This help article aims to simplify the website development process we use and get you ready to place your first website order with us in no time.
The first step is to decide the type of website most-suited to your business or purpose. We have created a helpful article on the the most common types of websites available on the web that we develop in-house.
Based on your requirements and other factors, you must decide on the type of website you would like to be developed before proceeding.
The next big thing is to tell us about your big idea. We start the formal process by you getting in touch with us.
Once you have submitted your contact information, we will get in touch to organise the rest of the steps and processes.
We are thrilled to hear your ideas and would love to make them a reality. To do this, we need to understand your requirements and expectations in detail.
So we can start hearing you out more clearly, we will schedule (often a series of) design meetings with you, where we will discuss the following:
It's all about you. We will get together and go through your business operations, products, and services so we understand your activities in detail.
We will hear about your target audience and the demographics of your existing clientelle. From here, we will have a basic overview of the content framework to follow when developing your website.
During this discussion, we will ask you questions and give you the chane to do the same.
We want understand what you aim to achieve with your new website, and to do that, we need to know about your requirements.
Some common examples of customer requirements for a website are e-commerce, email marketing integrations, CRM/ERP integrations, search engine optimisation (SEO), contact forms, etc.
Although the final time frame will depend on your requirements, we still discuss any important dates or events that must match with the deployment of your new website.
We will also ask you to point out a few existing website designs so we know what your vision for your website is.
If we believe we can work to deliver your expectations reasonably, we will present an Engagement Agreement. This is a legally-binding document that allows us to prepare your proposal, and be compensated for the hours we put in preparing your proposal should you wish to decline it.
The Engagement Agreement must be signed before we can proceed to the next stage.
Once we have documented all your requirements, we will work on them and prepare a proposal for your website project.
This proposal will be presented to you either virtually or in-person, where we will be available to answer any questions you may have.
In the unlikely event that we are unable to work with your expectations and requirements, we will let you know that we cannot proceed with you and that you should engage other developers.
The proposal will also have some important terms, as well as a formal estimate of your project. This proposal later forms part of the agreements relating to your website design and development.
You can choose to decline our proposal when you receive it - we will not ask any questions about your decision. We may however, ask you to provide feedback on the parts of the process that is completed so we can improve our services if needed.
If you choose to decline our proposal, the compensation agreed in the Engagement Agreement must be paid, and the decline must be made in writing.
If you are not happy with parts of the proposal, you can ask us to review and change some of the things.
Please note that changes to a proposal that is already presented may also cause changes to any project estimates. This will be clearly communicated to you in the revised proposal.
We will then review the proposal, prepare a revised proposal, and present it to you again.
Although we generally work with our clients to achieve a perfect outcome, the number of times you may request changes to our proposal may be limited. This will be clearly communicated with you when changes are requested.
If you are happy with the vision we propose for your website and the associated terms and conditions, you may accept our proposal in writing. This is encouraged to be done within 7 days of receiving our proposal, although we may provide additional time in some cases.
We will then proceed to the next step in developing your website.
This is a very important legal aspect of our engagement. Based on our proposal, and our terms and conditions of trading, we will draft a Design and Development Agreement that will need to be signed before we can proceed with the development.
These agreements list the terms and conditions of the website development as well as any support that we agree to provide once your website has been handed over to you.
You will be given the time to seek your own, independent legal advice on the agreement before deciding to sign and go ahead with us.
Once all agreements have been signed, and any applicable deposits paid, we will ask you to gather and send your website content to us.
You may have been gathering the content for some time before getting in touch with us, or might otherwise already have much of what we need to put on your website.
Some of the content that we might ask you to gather and provide ae:
We might be able to help you gather some content for your website, however, these may be under a separate agreement and may incur additional costs.
We will get in touch with you and send you details of our cloud file sharing service, BissesarCloud
.
BissesarCloud
is our own, private cloud that is used to store and share information and files between our clients and us.
We will also provide you with a basic user guide to make sharing your files easy, and our support team will be with you all the way to assist where required.
Once we have most (preferrably all) of your content, we will proceed to develop a protoype of your website. This prototype will be shared with you so you can comment on it and suggest changes.
Your content will be updated as obtained, and we will be in touch with you throughout this phase to fine-tune the prototype as needed.
When we are confident we are nearing the agreed design, we will show you around a full-featured demo of your website. We will also provide you with a link so you can share with your internal (or external) team and provide feedback for any required changes.
In accordance with our Design and Development Agreement, any changes you wish to have made to the demo will be reviewed and where applicable, made to the website.
It will then be presented again to you and you will be given time to test the website, its design, and features.
If you are happy with the Production Demo, you can accep the design in writing. We will then proceed to prepare for the website to be handed over to you.
When the final website files and databases have been fully-developed, we will package your website and deploy it on your hosting server.
If you have purchased hosting through us, this is usually includedd in the cost of your website design. We may charge you a small fee for uploading your files to your own web host and making the required changes to your hosting environment, if required.
After your website has been deployed on your hosting server, we will formally hand your website over to you.
This will be accompanied by a document that will include all the necessary credentials for accessing your website's control panel (if any), our terms and conditions for any agreed support, or recommendations for maintaining your website.
If your website is built on a Content Management System (CMS), a basic user manual will also be provided when your website is handed over to you.