Our Website Development Process

Careful Planning — Getting to Know Your Business or Institution

A successful website development project starts with careful planning. We have developed a procedure to ensure that the project moves through its various stages smoothly.

Project Questionnaire

Before our first meeting, HyperArts requests that you complete our Project Questionnaire. Completing this Questionnaire helps us and you to get a better idea of the look, the scope and the objectives of your business's site.

Understanding Your Business

Understanding your business and your brand is the critical first step. We work with you to clearly understand your current needs and long-term goals, as well as the competitive environment in which your business operates. We define how we will assess the success of the project. It is at this stage that we also outline the initial schedule and budget.

Develop a Technical Brief

It is very important that the technical aspects of your website are determined at the outset of the project. HyperArts ensures that we understand the technological requirements of your site. This involves determining:

The hosting environment: What hosting environment best suits the technical requirements of the site? Linux (LAMP)? Windows IIS? .NET? If you prefer open-source Web products and services, Linux would be your best choice.
Content Management System (CMS): Do you want a CMS so that you can manage your content updates internally, or do you want HyperArts to do the ongoing website maintenance? The selection of a CMS will be largely determined by the hosting environment. We specialize in the open-source CMS Drupal and, for the .NET platform, the open-source Umbraco.
Private site areas: Will you require a password-protected area for your website, and will each user have unique credentials or will there be one username/password for everyone? Will users be able to set up and manage accounts?
Forms: Will there be information-gathering or other types of forms on the site, and how will the data from the forms be handled?
Blogs: Will you want a blog or multiple blogs on your website, and how will they look and function? How will users be administered?
Threaded discussion forums: Will you want a discussion forum, either for internal use or for users of your products or services? How will this function and how will it be administered?
Social networking features: Do you wish to have features commonly associated with social networking sites, such as file sharing, user-generated content, ratings or voting, etc.
E-commerce: Do you want the ability to take payments online via credit card payments, PayPal, Amazon, etc? How will this function?
RSS feeds: Will you want users to be able to "subscribe" to your Web content via RSS?

Information Architecture & Site Map

Once the technical brief is developed, HyperArts works with you to identify all the content to be present at launch of the new website, and we work with you to determine how to most effectively present that information to the end-user. Once the information architecture is developed, we develop a site map — a schematic representation of the website's structure, indicating directories and files. For larger, more complex websites, we create a wireframe of your site, a design-free navigable site that allows you to test the viability of the structure. Revisions are made to the site map or wireframe until a final site architecture is agreed upon.

Integrating SEO into Your Website's Structure

When determining the structure of the website, we take into account the keywords and key phrases that your company considers "high value" — terms that when searched will return your site on the Search Engine Results Page, hopefully on the first page. By determining your high-value keywords/phrases, HyperArts can integrate these high-value keywords into your websites directory and file-naming. This approach can make a significant difference in your company's keyword ranking with the search engines.

HyperArts uses best practices when coding websites, utilizing Web Standards as developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and ensuring that your website is easily and accurately indexed by search engines and that the levels of importance of the content is conveyed through semantic mark-up. This may sound a bit technical, but it's a crucial detail in optimizing your website for the search engines.

Develop a Creative Brief

Using the questionnaire as a starting point, we fine tune your design requirements — what other websites do you like or dislike, and why? What sort of page layout do you prefer? Do you have an existing color palette for your brand or do you wish to have one created?

The outcome of this process is a detailed Creative Brief which is handed off to our designers who, guided by the brief, create the first round of designs for consideration. These designs are then revised through feedback from the client's decision maker until designs are finalized.

Implementation & Testing

We now do the coding and programming for the site. Once the site is built, we upload the files to the test site and commence tests for useability, cross-platform issues, and functionality. Any problems or issues are identified and solutions determined.

Launch & Follow-up

Once all Quality Assurance issues are resolved, we put the site online at the specified URL. If you are going to be maintaining the site in-house, a client-side support team is identified and training conducted. The site is registered with the major search engines. Site performance is monitored closely.

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