There are numerous steps in the website design and development process, but the basic steps are:
- Information gathering
- Planning
- Design
- Development
- Testing and Delivery
- Maintenance

At SillyDoh our approach to creating a website starts with talking to you and understanding your business needs.

The first few things that we consider when creating a website are:
- Target audience of your website
- The purpose of your website
- The key functions of your website
- Design preferences of your website

Defining The Target Audience
Target audience is one of the key factors taken into consideration. A site aimed at teenagers, for example, will look much different than one meant for a financial institution.

Defining The Goal
Every website should have a goal or number of goals that are measurable. A goal can be anything from communicating with friends to making a profit by selling products or online services. Your goal in the first instance may even be to have a web presence so potential clients regard your business as being cutting edge.

Defining Key Functions
Once the goals of the website have been established, it’s important to define the actions required by site visitors to meet the goals. An action is any traceable sequence of events carried out by the end user, like:
- Getting in touch - either by phone, email or via online form
- Disseminating information
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Completing a questionnaire
- Commenting on a blog
- Downloading or buying products
- Using an online tool

Establish Your Design Preferences
Once you have formulated the goals and functional requirements for the website, it’s time to start building a picture of how you anticipate the site coming together. SillyDoh will be able to add a lot of input and suggestions, but it helps to have some ideas to feed into the requirements you provide SillyDoh. Things to consider would be a color scheme (preferred colors), logo placement, number of webpages needed and addition of a mobile website.

Designing Your Website
Drawing from the information gathered at this point, it’s time to determine the look and feel of your site. SillyDoh will create one or more prototype designs for your website. This is typically an image file (jpg or tiff) of what the final design will look like. SillyDoh will always allow you to view your project throughout the design and development stages. The most important reason for this is that it gives you the opportunity to express your likes and dislikes on the site design.

In this phase, communication between both you and your designer is crucial to ensure that the final website will match your needs and taste. It’s important that you work closely with your designer, exchanging ideas, until you arrive to the final design for your website.

Developing Your Website
The developmental stage is the point where the website itself is created. The entire time, SillyDoh will continue to make your in-progress website available to you for viewing, so that you can suggest any additional changes or corrections you would like to have done.

Testing And Delivering Your Website
At this point, SillyDoh will attend to the final details and test your website. Testing functionality of forms or other scripts, as well as testing between different web browsers, ensuring that your website is optimized to be viewed properly in the most recent browser versions.

Maintenance of Your Website
One way to bring repeat visitors to your website is to offer new content or products on a regular basis. SillyDoh will be more than happy to continue working together with you to update the information on your website.

Other maintenance type items include SES (Search Engine Submission) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is the optimization of your website with elements such as title, description and keyword tags which help your website achieve higher ranking in the search engines.