Your website communicates who you are, what you offer, and brings in new leads for your business. To be effective at this, your site needs to be easy to navigate, have a clean structure with obvious calls to action, while at the same time be visually and emotionally appealing.
Discovery
We start our website design process with a kick-off meeting to meet the key project stakeholders, and get an overall understanding of the project needs. In this session, we do a deep dive into your business: We discuss your vision and business objectives and discuss how your website will support these objectives. We talk about your audience and your competition, and discuss how you will see your business growing over the next few years. This enables to build website that is flexible and can grow as you add on products and services. As part of the Discovery phase, we do some of our own research including reviewing any relevant customer feedback and analytics, and reviewing other material concerning your industry.
Interaction Design
Our Interaction Design phase for websites typically start with a Site Map. Our Information Architects develops the overall site structure that serves as the guide for where pages will live, and provide a map of your site’s content. After the structure is set, we focus on laying out the key templates of the site as black and white UI Sketches. These UI Sketches focus on the content and layout without the distraction of Visual Design.
After we lock on the UI Sketches, our Visual Designers develop the website’s look and feel. We can adhere to any branding guidelines, if you have them, or we can create an entirely new look for your website. Our approach to Visual Design is to provide you with two to three different approaches, and we have multiple designers work on these to make sure you get a wide range in approaches. Based on your feedback, we narrow these approaches down to one coherent design, and apply this design to remaining templates.
Identity Design
As part of the website design project, we can develop a completely new logo, or make adjustments to your current one. As part of this service,, we provide you with a variety of mark concept and color explorations. You select the one that you feel works best, and we fine tune it for web and for print.
Content Management System (CMS) Setup and Build Out
A Content Management System (CMS) offers non-technical personnel a relatively easy way to update the website without IT”s help. They empower content owners while reducing technical team’s workload. Busse Design can set up and build out a CMS for your website using Drupal, WordPress or Joomla. We can set up the CMS based on your team’s unique needs, and taking into consideration how your site will grow. We will also help you think about the other technical considerations that are necessary for a CMS. After we deliver the CMS, we will provide documentation and a walk-through of how to update your content.
HTML Template Production
If you already have a CMS in place or are not ready for one quite yet, we can buld HTML Templates for your website. Our standard approach is to code to web standards either in XHTML 1.1, CSS 2 or HTML 5 and CSS 3, both using UTF-8. We apply industry best practices for search engines, human accessibility and site architecture. . That means we implement a strict separation of structure (semantically correct pages), style (external style sheets) and behavior (external scripts); and we follow general Section 508 accessibility guidelines. We use a proven, cross-browser compatible, JavaScript library - jQuery - to implement all site behaviors. If you have different requirements, we can change our coding style to meet your unique requirements.
For all projects, we recommend taking advantage of one of our Usability Services to ensure that user stays in the center of the design process.