Define. Design. Refine.
Website design has often been called “the most hostile development environment in the world.” That’s a bit dramatic, but accurate. A website is complex. Lots of moving parts. Wrangling those parts into a useful customer experience takes a lot of skill. Try to do it yourself and you’ll quickly learn the “hostile” part. We can help.
Traditional web design
The typical approach to website design involves all sorts of static files like wireframes, story boards, mood boards, and mockups. These are usually delivered to the client as PDFs or images that must be approved before moving on to the next “phase” in the design process.
The problem is, none of these files are functional: you can’t click, slide, scroll, navigate, select, or resize. To make matters worse, most of this stuff is based on faulty assumptions gleaned from weeks of “research” done by marketing interns.
Rube worthy
A better way
The traditional web design process is broken, so we fixed it. Our agile design system shortens the whole development timeline by months, and saves you money and countless headaches. It’s also really simple. First make it work, then make it work better.
Rapid Web Design
If you sell anything, the purpose of your website is to turn visitors into customers. And you can’t do that if your new site gets held up by endless discussions about strategy, branding, voice, and personas. Why spend weeks doing research to generate a bunch of assumptions that later turn out to be invalid?
Instead, why not make just a few fundamental assumptions, then launch your site and test those beliefs with real visitors? Our Rapid Web Design framework lets you do just that. It simplifies everything — you can test new ideas, get more done, and do it faster. Plus, you’ll have a lot more fun along the way.
01. Define
There’s no need for committees, teams, PowerPoints, or conference calls. We start by answering a few simple questions:
- What is the problem?
- What resources are available to solve the problem?
- Based on the resources available, what are your goals for the website?
- What core functionality is required to achieve your goals?
02. Design
Based on answers to the questions above, we begin building your website. We always proceed with the following principles in mind:
- Design with the notion that parts other than HTML are optional. This results in a better and stronger website.
- Execute core functionality using the simplest available technology.
- Provide a functional demonstration site to share progress during the design process.
03. Refine
When your new site is officially live and available to the public, we test our assumptions with real visitors. Using Google Analytics, we monitor your website traffic to make sure your site is behaving as expected. If not, we revise and improve until your goals are met. A few of the traffic metrics we like to follow are:
- Pageviews: A pageview is reported when a page has been viewed by a user on your website.
- Traffic sources: The traffic source metric shows where your traffic is coming from.
- Bounce rate: A bounce is reported when a user’s session only contains a single pageview.
- Exit rate: For all pageviews to the page, exit rate is the percentage that were the last in the session.
- Top pages: Your best performing pages in terms of traffic volume.
- Average session duration: A top-level view of how long users are spending on your website.
- Conversion rate: A calculated metric that divides goal completions by users to create a user goal conversion rate.
What’s a demonstration site?
A demonstration (demo) site is a temporary development website used to share progress during the design process. Unlike wireframes and mockups, the demo site is fully functional; its got multiple pages, working navigation, JavaScript effects, graphics, and images. However, it may contain temporary “placeholder” text and images until the final content is created.
Your demo site is password-protected, so only those you share it with can view it. It also contains a few code snippets that prevent Google and other search engines from indexing it.
When we’re ready, and everything’s been approved, we convert the demo site to a live site, and point your domain name to it. It’s sort of like moving your business to a new location, in a much nicer building.
