We work using an “iterative” process that recognizes the importance of producing meaningful and concrete deliverables for you as early and as often as possible. By keeping you in the loop and involved with our progress we share a common understanding of the circumstances and requirements of the project and reduce the chances of delivering a final product that betrays your expectations. Over the course of our relationship with you we will iterate through the following 5 steps many times over.
Discover
It all begins with an introductory phone call or two with the purpose of establishing our credibility and the general outline of your requirements. With this information in hand both of us can make a general assessment regarding the appropriate fit between your requirements and our capabilities and working style.
The deliverables of this phase are a simple outline document that details the information conveyed to us and a general description of the project as it might be implemented in Drupal. We also provide a very rough estimate concerning amount of working time required to design, develop, and deploy the site. This phase of the process is always free of charge.
Design
Unfortunately the estimate created above isn't very accurate. Building a website is very similar to building a house in that way. While a home builder can estimate the approximate costs by the square footage of the house your decisions along the way (stairs or elevator, tub enclosure or custom bath, etc) can start to add up and have a big effect on the total amount of time and money required to get the project completed. We understand that nobody like surprises; neither do we. We have found that the best way to make sure we all share the same vision is to create and present a series of "wireframes" that describe the functionality and a “mockup” that illustrates the aesthetic direction of the site.
There will be quite a bit of back and forth while we gather your requirements and test our implementation ideas against your understanding of the business environment your organization and site will operate in. The purpose of this phase is an exacting description of the sites design and function. The primary deliverable will be the wireframe documents, our explanation of how they work together, an graphic mockup that shows you the actually look and feel of the design and a much better estimate of the work involved to design and develop the whole system.
Develop
This is where we fuse the wireframes, and the mockup to create a platform that encompasses all of the functionality described from the previous phase. Along the way we will allow you to login and see our progress. We will also setup a case tracking solution so that you can submit defects and feature suggestions along the way. The deliverables for this phase include the sites codebase, graphics and database setup.
Deploy + Debrief
When all the dust settles and you’ve signed off on the completed phase we deploy it to the wild and work with you to gather feedback about how we did managing your expectations and fulfilling your requirements. Here is also where we might make suggestions for future development of your site or hand it off to an in-house maintainer if you have one on staff.