Site Dynamics is a one person shop; this gives me the flexibility to adopt styles of interaction and development flows that suit your needs, and focus my efforts in the areas you want addressed.
Development Phases
Here are the basic steps that need to occur in proper development of a web site. "The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites" lays this out as well as anyone; below is a workflow adopted from it:
The Discovery Phase
The purpose of Discovery is to determine and clarify the scope of the project, your goals as my customer, and the needs of the intended visitors to your site. This phase often starts with analysis of whether a Web site is the best option for your goals. By the end of Discovery, you and I should have a shared understanding of three things:
- The target visitors to the site and their needs (people, tasks, technology and social issues)
- The business goals of this project
- The features that the Web site should provide for customers when the work is completed
The Preproduction Phase
During the exploration phase sitemaps, storyboards and schematics are developed with increasing degrees of refinement. Initial designs often do not reflect ideas about color, imagery and typography; they do reflect ideas about site structure and navigation. Further development is refines the navigation, layout and flow of the design; the sitemap, storyboard and schematics take on increasingly highter higher resolution.
The Production Phase
This phase creates a detailed set of deliverables that embody and represent the final disign idea. The deliverables - items such as interactive prototypes, written design descriptions, design guidelines and technical specifications, are high-fidelity and contain as much detail as possible about layout, navigation visuals and content for each web page.
The Implementation Phase
This phase is what most people actually think of as web design - the detailed implementation of the plans developed in earlier phases.
Isn't that a Lot of Paper?
No!
The temptation is always to just dive in. Some clients prefer to be shown pages, then request changes until they get what they want. This is actually the least efficient - and most costly - way to develop a site. After 30 years of software- and product- development, I can safely state clarifing requirements up front makes everyone's life better - yours, mine, any your accountant's ...
