Design Process
Our goal is to create a retail ecommerce site that converts visitors into buyers, increases registered users, creates repeat
visitors (who bookmark the site), and is a profitable online sales channel. The purpose of this initial phase is to organize site
content according to usability and ecommerce best-practices. With your input, we’ll refine and quantify how your products should be
presented and how users should interact with the website. We’ll take a close look and critical areas like checkout, all levels of
product navigation, and search features to ensure a friction-free user experience. The site will function and flow in a way that makes
sense to your unique retail business.
This is where we identify your target audience and determine the personality, tone, and style of your site (“look and feel”). We'll conduct
research into your specific industry to discover (among other things) who are the market leaders, what is the visual language of your industry,
and what separates you from your competitors. We'll rely on your input and suggestions during this research phase to form opinions about
important "soft" factors like color, choice of imagery (ex: animate, abstract, iconic), and fonts. This phase results in graphical comps
(mock-ups), which represent the overall “look and feel” of your website. Once approved, these comps go through a refinement process,
resulting in a final version.
Having determined the information architecture, written content, and the “look and feel,” we can apply this information to create a non-functional
HTML prototype. We build out the entire website, including checkout, membership sign up, and other dynamic and static areas. You'll be able to
view exactly how the entire site will look and flow by logging into our staging server. Visual prototyping helps clarify remaining logical
issues and helps ensure that the site appeals to shoppers – not just programmers.
Here we integrate the required functionality, test, refine, and check quality (unbroken links, correct calculations, correct implementation
of all features and rules, valid HTML, proper form validation, and other quality and security checks). Once the project passes internal
approval, we prepare a functional alpha site for your final viewing, testing, and approval. Now, you can actually test functions yourself
and direct final changes before the final launch. At the end of this stage, all that remains is to migrate your website from our staging
server to your production server and you'll be live.
This is always an exciting moment. What was initially just an idea, has now materialized into a tangible asset to your business. We perform
a final quality check on the production server, move databases as needed, install SSL, and update your DNS setting, which makes the new site
live. After going live, we continue to assist your business by providing free technical, design, and logistical support for 60 days.
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