Website Development
You can get a website – out of the box – and start publishing content. However, with every project there comes a time when you want to deliver more functionality, or custom content, and for that we need to develop custom solutions to deliver what you need.
Building websites is what we've done for a decade. We will recommend the appropriate technology for your project, plan it out, and start building.
In medicine, prognosis without diagnosis is malpractice – the same goes for website development
We have the combined skills to apply a variety of tools to suit your job. We can recommend an appropriate solution for your project and we will continue to offer you solutions during and after the job if something catches our eye and we think it would be the right fit for you.
All code is tested throughout the development process to ensure the website works consistently on iOS and Android, on phones and tablets, plus laptops and desktops on both Apple and Windows.
Website Development Checklist
We've compiled a checklist of the most commonly overlooked items when developing a website. These are the questions you should be asking your development team.
Download your free copy today.
Website Development Best Practices
Over the last decade we've refined a solid development process to reduce risk (for you and us) and increase quality. Here's a summary, you can read more in our blog post about Website Development Best Practices.
Planning
The first stage of development is planning. Call me old school but we can work out a lot of stuff with pen and paper before we start writing any code. “Measure twice, cut once,” as the chippies say.
Research and documentation
We need to fully understand your processes – to the point where our team can perform the entire process without you.
User Stories
We create sets of "tasks" that a user would perform and rewrite them as a user story. This means we can think about the functionality as a user rather than the technical requirements. Once we have all the user stories we can create the technical tasks to complete each one.
Mockups and Flowcharts
We create clickable mockups (mockups focused on content and process over design). Clickable mockups allow us to thoroughly resolve any new business processes or workflows before a line of code is written.
Design mockups
Once we've resolved the functionality we can apply the design to the mockups. Again, we've resolved all the look and functionality before we've written any code.
Agile Project Management
Now that we know what's required we can plan and schedule the project using agile methodology. Tasks are grouped into sprints which are short focused periods usually a few weeks long. At the end of the sprint we report back what’s been completed before planning the next sprint.
Task Management and Documentation Software
We use Atlassian's Jira and Confluence to keep track of all tasks, issues, and documentation. This means all your project information is securely stored in one place and we're all on the same page.
Development Workflow
Projects are developed on local (in-house) servers. They are tested and moved to a staging server. On the staging server you can log in and test the functionality as if it was a live site. Once everything is working as planned we "push" the changes to the production server. The production server is the live system.
Version Control
We use a software version control system (called Git) so we can manage the development process from different developers and servers. This allows us to monitor the development process and quickly identify any issues.