{"id":62851,"date":"2018-01-24T11:15:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T16:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.acscreative.com\/?p=62851"},"modified":"2018-01-24T11:15:38","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T16:15:38","slug":"web-design-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/?p=62851","title":{"rendered":"The Web Design Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s fair to say a website can make or break a business. Whether you run a small town storefront or an ecommerce empire, your online presence is key to growth and success. It\u2019s important to you because it\u2019s important to your customers. Even the most seasoned entrepreneur might be familiar with the steps necessary to set up a business, build out a retail location, and manage the operation\u2013yet still be completely in the dark about what goes into creating a website.<\/p>\n

Today, we\u2019re giving you a glimpse into our web design process here at ACS. We feel it\u2019s valuable for business owners to understand not only the steps necessary to launch a successful website, but also to know the intensive effort and strategic attention we give to each of our client projects.<\/p>\n

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Discovery<\/h3>\n

To kick-off the web design process, we must first establish the site\u2019s goals and objectives. Discovery is a collaborative dialogue between agency and client to solidify the finer details of the finished project. If you have an existing website, we assess the content and determine what goes and what stays\u2013what\u2019s working and what\u2019s not. From there, we develop a working sitemap<\/strong>,\u00a0which is, quite simply, a list of webpages and purposes for each.<\/p>\n

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Wireframing & Visual Design<\/h3>\n

The Discovery phase is an essential first step in the web design process, but, frankly, it\u2019s a lot of text and diagrams. Here, you get to see your project come to life! Working from your approved sitemap, our User Experience (UX) specialists get to work on homepage wireframes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Though wireframes lack color, depth, and texture, they act as a blueprint for various elements that will be used site-wide, such as navigation, header, footer, etc. At this stage, you\u2019re likely to see \u201cdummy\u201d text (lorem ipsum) and placeholder images instead of your own content, as we fine-tune the final page layout.<\/p>\n

Now the fun really begins! Once wireframes are approved, our designers will deliver fully-produced mockups<\/strong> of those pages. This is your opportunity to see colors, images, fonts, and styles as they will appear on the website.<\/p>\n

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Frontend Buildout & Development<\/h3>\n

Nearly all of our clients host their sites with us because the value is simply astounding. We are able to spread the enormous cost of secure cloud hosting among\u00a0many sites. This affords us the ability to setup a private staging<\/strong> environment to build your project in. Your current website continues to serve visitors as it always has while we create something new, beautiful, and exciting behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

First, we deploy a Content Management System<\/strong> (CMS) such as WordPress or Drupal, which allows clients to make easy edits and updates after launch. The CMS acts as the foundation on which the entire site is built.<\/p>\n

Our developers then use the sitemaps, wireframes, and mockups previously established to make it all a reality in beautiful code. Custom features and functionality are built and tested rigorously. The end result is a fully-functional, responsive website<\/strong>. At this point, we\u2019re ready to drop in or migrate your content, images, and media.<\/p>\n

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Website Launch<\/h3>\n

The big day is here\u2013launch time. Admittedly, we often feel like we\u2019re in the NASA control room during this final phase. It\u2019s all hands on deck as we test page speed, browser compatibility, malware vulnerabilities, and various devices.<\/p>\n

If your new site is replacing an existing one, our goal is to minimize downtime during the transition process. When dealing with domains and hosting changes (DNS<\/strong>), there are several considerations to plan for including email, server propagation, and 301 redirects. For this reason, we devise a launch plan<\/strong> in collaboration with all stakeholders.<\/p>\n

On the predetermined day and time, our team transfers all files and assets from the staging environment to the production server, where it will live permanently.\u00a0The\u00a0domain is reassigned to our host, and your brand new website is live for the world to see! No matter how large or small your project, now is the appropriate time to celebrate<\/strong> (in case you weren\u2019t sure).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take a look at our website design process and what goes into a successful site launch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[12,27,9],"class_list":["post-62851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-websites","tag-design","tag-development","tag-user-experience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acsredux.acscreativedev.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}