What: Internet: Site Design

FoxDot takes the view that the success of your website design is a result of a process that incorporates several factors from your overall business (corporate identity, company or product brands, marketing or sales objectives, etc.), and incorporates them into a robust development process consisting of the following phases:

Discovery - An initial meeting or series of meeting to determine the goals and direction for the website. This is often very important for small business websites and is often not given the importance that it deserves. Given limited resources, it's often very difficult to have a website that can be a do-everything site and important direction decisions should be made early on such as: Is the site primarily intended to be a marketing or a sales tool? Is the site design geared toward the long-term, or is the intent to design a site that will be able to change to reflect certain business conditions? Is the intent of the site to offer a place for you to communicate with your customers in an individualized manner?
Information Architecture Development - Information architecture (IA) is at its heart, about figuring what you want your site to do, then developing a blueprint that will guide the actual development of your site. Elements such as your site's form, function, metaphor, navigation and interface, interaction, and visual design will be guided by the design crafted during the IA stage.
Identity and Brand Integration - Once the information groundwork has been laid out, the process of creating the design and graphical elements begins. It's important that as this part of the process moves forward, that due consideration is given to the identity communication as well as corporate or product brand messages that should be portrayed. As much as possible, every graphical design element, color scheme, navigational tool, etc. should have a strong tie to the corporate identity and brand messages. If FoxDot was used from the initiation of your identity and brand development process, all of this information is contained in our process. If FoxDot is being used only for the web development portion, we will take guidance from your existing identity and brand strategy.
Prototype Creation - The next stage is the creation of a number of visual "mock-ups" to determine and ease communication of design directions.
Beta Site Creation - Once a design direction has been determined from the prototype stage, work on the functional site begins.
Site Publication - Once the beta site has been tested and signed off on, the site is published to the web server and considered "live".
Site Maintenance - The importance of keeping content on your website fresh and timely can not be overstated. It's just as important to look to continually add new and valuable tools, sections, or features to your site. As part of your development engagement with FoxDot, you can choose to hire us to be your webmaster on an ongoing basis.