How We Work

Before you commit to hiring a website development company, it’s important to see and understand the process.

Our Approach

A web development project with Imp Designs starts with an information exchange. Once we feel we have a solid understanding of your goals, requirements, and vision, we will present you with our proposal so you know exactly what we’re going to build for the price we’re proposing. Once we agree on the work to be done and the price, we have you sign our contract (blame the bad eggs we’ve come across for that!), ask for a 20% deposit and we get to work.

We use an online project management tool, Trello, to manage the communication between our team and yours. With your Trello account, you’ll be able to view our to-do lists and monitor our progress, view comps of your site design, upload files, collaborate with fine tuning your site outline and send messages to our team. We prefer to host the sites we build on one of our dedicated servers. We use Liquid Web as our hosting company because their team of level 3 technicians are available by phone 24/7/365.

The sites we build utilize an amazing bit of software called ExpressionEngine. After experimenting with a wide variety of content management systems, we settled on ExpressionEngine due to its ease of use and flexable nature. We’re proud to say we’re a member of the ExpressionEngine Professional Network. We believe in web standards, so all of our sites are hand coded to the exacting standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium. We test for cross browser compatibility across all major browsers and operating systems. We use versioning software to maintain the integrity of your site’s code base and to facilitate the collaborative efforts of our development team. And that’s the techie stuff… in the end, it’s our goal to produce a web site that produces for you. We install Google Analytics on every site we build and give you access to the reports so that we can watch your site’s performance over time. After all, you can’t control that which you cannot measure. All techie-ness aside, we want the site to look good. We’re still a bit artsy and feel that the days of butt-ugly clunky websites are behind us.

Our Process

Our six step process ensures that both us and our clients are on the same page, every step of the way.

Development of a Site Outline

The site outline is a simple outline defining all major sections of the site, pages within those sections and descriptions of what data will display on given pages. It describes the organizational structure of the site and allows our team to build the template structure to support the site.

Development of a Data Chart

The data chart describes all the fields that will be present in the forms that ExpressionEngine uses for content management. The data chart provides the information necessary for our team to program the back-end functionality of the website.

Development of Wireframes

Wireframes are hand drawn illustrations of where the individual components of the site pages will be positioned. The navigational elements, header and footer, layout of individual pages and so forth will be illustrated for review. Wireframes enable our team to develop a working prototype.

Development of a Working Prototype

We will develop a working prototype of the site prior to developing the graphic skin. A working prototype is an actual working copy of the website stripped to it’s basic elements. You’ll be able to click through the site, examine how the site’s content displays and experience the functionality of the site.

Development and Application of Graphic Skin

Once the prototype works as desired, our artists will present graphic appearances for the site. We’ll present these one at a time and will make adjustments based on feedback from your company. Once the graphic appearance has been approved, we’ll apply the appearance to the prototype.

Site Launch and Post Launch

After the graphic appearance has been applied to the site and your company is satisfied that the new site is ready for launch, we’ll make the site live and build redirects for any site URLs that have changed. This will insure that any past visitors that bookmarked pages will still have access to those pages and will also allow existing links in Google to still work. These redirects will also allow any previous SEO efforts to transfer to the new site. We will develop the new site on a sub-domain so that all progress can be monitored by the company’s staff. Once the site development is complete, we’ll manage the launch and will build redirects for any URLs which may have changed during the development process.

What are you waiting for? Contact us and let us rev up your site!