We strive to ensure our quality of development is always of the highest standard.
This entails following a defined development path consisting of the following areas:
1. Analysis:
We strongly believe that a well built and a well balanced system is paramount to its success, therefore when it comes to analysing your requirements we will work very closely with you to understand your individual needs and how it fits in with your business strategy.
The analysis process is a stage where our consultants learn about your business and where your business learns about us and what technology has to offer. This stage is invaluable in that it helps to identify they key deliverables of your system.
2. Specification Building:
Once we have identified the key points of your required system the next stage of our process is to define a functional requirements document which describes in detail the way the system will look and behave.
This document aims to cover each and every element of your requirement, e.g. the various modules of your system, including general layout, site navigation and dynamic parts of the site.
Larger projects normally require more detailed levels of consultation to assess additional business and technical requirements. They are also often followed by a more detailed technical requirements document which is handed over to our development team. At some stage we also produce working prototypes to test or demonstrate a particular concept.
All our documents are shared and built in conjunction with you and are only given to our developers once they have been approved by all parties.
3. Design and development:
After defining the specification, work on the web site is scheduled upon receipt of the agreed requirements document, a deposit, and any written content materials and graphics you wish to include.
In some cases our customer may be interested in viewing two or three sample designs to assess the look and interactivity of the site.
The development process is carefully managed and all progress is communicated back to you by email and telephone. When required we can even give you access to our development servers to review the current progress of your site.
Throughout the development phase it is important to develop test plans and procedures for quality assurance and the next stage in our process.
4. Testing:
Web based applications need intensive testing, as the applications will always function as a multi-user system with bandwidth limitations. This inculdes integration testing, stress testing, scalability testing, load testing, resolution testing and cross-browser compatibility testing. An example of one element of our testing is to test fast loading graphics and to calculate their loading time, as they are very important for any web site. There are certain testing tools as well as some online testing tools which also help our testers to test applications, e.g. for sites built using ASP we use Microsoft's Web Application Test Tool to test the ASP applications.
5. Online Marketing Promotion:
This phase is applicable only for web sites where the client has requested search engine optimisation.
Promotion needs preparation of meta tags, constant analysis and submitting the URL to the search engines and directories.
Keywords for the meta tags and content are identified using established online tools such as WordTracker.
The site promotion is normally an ongoing process as the strategies of search engine may change quite often. Submitting a site URLs once in 2 months can be an ideal submission policy. If the customer is willing, then paid click and paid submissions can also be done with additional cost.
6. Maintenance and Updating:
Web sites will need quite frequent updates to keep them very fresh and help them perform better under most popular search engines. In this case we carry out more analysis, and all the other product life cycle steps are repeated.
Bug fixes are fixed immediately and at no cost.
Once your web site is operational, ongoing promotion, technical maintenance, content management & updating, site visit activity reports, staff training and mentoring is needed on a regular basis depend on the complexity of your web site and the needs within your business.
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