With everyone heading back to school, I thought it would be a good time to do a little Project Process 101. Of course, we try to make your site’s launch as easy as possible for you; who wants to worry about technical stuff? There are, however, a few big phases in the lifecycle of a web project.

The first step – requirements gathering – begins when you come to us with an idea for a new site or application. This is the point where we’ll ask you about your company and your needs. We’ll also ask for information about how you want your site or tool to work.

After we have a good understanding of your idea, we’ll start the design phase. Our designers will prepare a few ideas based on the information you gave to us (your company branding, colors, and the like), and we’ll send you a link to a page that shows some screenshots of how your site could look. You’re free to choose any of the ideas, or, if you like, you can choose different parts that you like from different ideas.

At this point we’ll discuss options depending on the scope and budget of your project. Depending on your project’s size, we may suggest that we develop the site in milestones, starting with basic functionality, so that you can start using the site without having to wait until all your requirements are complete. Again, this depends on the size, budget, and timeline for your project.

Have you chosen the design ideas you like? Great! We’ll pass the project to our development team, who will work furiously in front of their screens writing the code to make your site run. This may take some time, but we’ll give you progress reports as the site moves forward.

We may find we have more questions during the development stage, but once the code for the site is complete we’ll pass it back to you for the feedback and testing stage. We’ll throughly test the site in-house, and we’ll also ask for any feedback you have. If there are changes you want to make, we’ll do some more design or development work and make sure you’re happy before launch.

After you’ve approved the design and development, it’s time for the big day: launch! Sometimes we’ll need to coordinate with you depending on how your site is configured, but launching is often one of the simplest parts of the process.

As we’ve said before, we want to be there for you even after the site launches. If you have changes you’d like to make, let us know! If we split the project into milestones, this is when we’d cycle back to work on the next round of development for your site.

Our goal throughout the process is to make you comfortable and aware of everything that’s happening in the process. We’re as excited to see your site go live as you are!

This post is part of our How We Work series, an ongoing look at what you can expect when you choose Sephone as your online presence partner. Each post in the series talks a bit about one part of our web development process.