Website Development Process

Here are the main steps involved in the development of your online presence:

• Client defines the main goals for the site.
• Client determines characteristics of the target market - will they be mostly businesses? Adult males? Teens? This will help us to select appropriate design features and color schemes.
• Client anticipates the audience's goals when visiting the site - What do they hope to find when they get there? This is worth considering: how well do you understand what your audience wants? Which of the components of your site are they most likely to be looking for? Answers to these questions will help us to lay out the content in a useful way.
• Client is encouraged to research competitors' websites. Are there any components of those sites that you'd like to emulate on your site? While we shouldn't copy anything, we can gain some inspiration from these other sites.
• After we discuss the above points, a color scheme and layout can be determined. I'll prepare a wireframe (sketch) of the layout of your site, so you can envision the arrangement of parts within your pages.
• Once the number of pages and special site features (contact form, flash animations, etc) are decided upon, I'll quote a price for the project.
• All content (text and images) that you want on your site must be provided at this point, along with a payment of 50% of the quoted price.
• Upon receipt of your content and initial payment, build-out of the site will begin.
• Progress updates will be viewable via the Latitude17south web server, and client comments and modifications are encouraged as the stages of development are completed.
• As the coding nears completion, validation checks will be made through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website, to ensure our code is in compliance with the latest industry standards.
• When the site is fully developed, the client will have a final chance to make modifications before the site goes "live". The site should be tested by all parties involved to ensure 100% functionality across different browsers. A final check of W3C standards compliance will be made at the conclusion of this stage.
• Payment is due once the client is satisfied with the site, and before files are uploaded to client's server.
• After files are uploaded to client's server, site will be submitted to major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and any others of client's choice), and will be fully "live". Note that there can be several weeks between search engine submission and actual crawling of your site by the search engine spiders.
• You can be sure of my continued support for any changes you may need to make to your site. Modifications to your live site will be billed at $30/hour.