In order to successfully develop a website that meets your needs, there are a series of phases which must be completed.  These are a standard set of phases that are used in the IT industry to insure a project is successful.  Briefly, here are the things that we will need to do:

Discovery: We will have one or more meetings to talk about what you think you want done and what your goals are. These meetings will help define the general scope of the project. Depending on how the initial meeting goes, we will set up additional meetings to continue to define the project. If you decide you want to proceed, we will move into a more formal requirements gathering phase. We will also be able to give you a price estimate. If the estimate is outside your desired budget, we will work with you to figure out what could be done to make it affordable.

Requirements: This phase is very important. We will work with you to figure out what you want your web presence to be: how you want it to look, who your audience is, the various pages you think you want, what functions you want it to perform, etc.  We will also discuss how you want to maintain and update your site. All of the requirements will be documented and agreed upon.  At the end of this phase, we will set up the schedule for the development of your site and finalize our contract so that we both understand what will be done.

Design: During this phase we will focus on how your website will look. If you need a logo, we will design this. We will design and document the way your pages will be laid out. We will also have an agreed upon list of how many pages will need to be developed and what they will, generally, contain. By the end of this phase, we should be ready to develop your website.

Development: During this phase we will actually develop your website, with the initial content that you have requested. If this is a new site, we will need to obtain your new URL and also decide on a web hosting provider so we will have a place to put your site. If we are redoing an existing website, we will initially do some development on a testing server so you can verify that the new site looks and works the way you want.  At the end of this phase, all of the defined pages will have been created and you will be ready to test your new site.

Testing: During this phase you will be asked to work with your new website to make sure it looks and acts the way you want. We will work with you to make changes as needed, based on your testing. At the end of this phase we will be ready to go live with your new site.

Deployment: We will make your site live. We will provide you with documentation on how to update and manage your site. We will continue to support you as you get comfortable with working with your new site.  We will make changes and fix things as necessary.

Maintenance: We will continue to provide you support for your site based on what was agreed upon in our contract. If the initial terms for maintenance seem to not be working, we will work with you to redefine this phase of the project.

At the end of the project, we want you to be happy with your new web presence and the way it allows you to interact with your intended audience.