The Development Cycle

There are several steps or phases to be undertaken when building your web site. We list them as Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing and Consolidation.

There are two other elements in the design process, which although they are not the primary forces driving the design, they are important and must be considered within the process. These elements are marketing and maintenance.

You may question why such phases are necessary. Building a web site is really no different from any other construction project, whether it's a word processor or a car. Each project however complicated follows these phases. The product must be defined in terms of what it is to achieve, what role it is to fulfil, what is really required - Analysis. Plans are then developed as to how the product is to be constructed, user interfaces, functionality etc. - Design. Following the plans produced from the design phase we construct the end item - Construction. Once constructed we have to find out if it works the way we want it to - Testing. If some of the aspects of the product do not work according to plan then we need to make changes to those aspects to achieve the required functionality - Consolidation.

By following this basic plan we can produce a web site that works. We aim to keep maintenance and marketing in mind throughout the process, particularly the design and implementation phases. Marketing is a relatively simple issue. We know that when a submission is made to a search engine to include your site in the search engine listings, some of those search engines use software to gain information that they require about your site. So we take into consideration how that information is to be accessed/collected by the search engine software in use.

Maintenance is a more complex issue. We build our sites to the HTML standard as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C. Each of the browsers complies to these standards as their baseline functionality. However there are some anomalies in terms of the actual implementation of the standard, so when building web sites we have to take any of these anomalies into consideration, and where required, add additional coding to ensure that your site can be viewed by the maximum number of users. When we build your web site we will ensure that the code that we use is readable by others. This makes maintenance of your web site a simpler task, and therefore aids in keeping the long term costs of running a web site to a minimum.

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