Elevate Your Online Store

The next step is Information Architecture. Here is determined how the information on your website will be organized. This means that the content and features from Discovery are put into a structure, including the menus and submenus. You can look at it as a map of your website, where you have the main roads of your main categories and then the smaller streets branching off them. This will enable the developers to build the framework that your site will be designed around. The structure is critical to ensure your customers get the best possible experience while search engines rank you highly. After all, the best user experience will not help you much if people can’t find your site in the first place.

After the Information Architecture has been established, the wireframe is the next step. The wireframe is the skeleton of your website, similar to a wireframe used for a sculpture or a model. This is essential because it will firm up the layout, including how your eCommerce solution will be integrated into the rest of the website. This is also a critical phase for UX to be considered, as this is the first visualization of how users will see and interact with the information on your website. By bringing UX in at this stage, you can incorporate functionality into the visual side of the page right away to strike the right balance between UI and UX.

The Design phase of the process will see the visual side of the website take shape. Our designers will work with you to create the first vision of the live site. Using fonts, colours, images, layouts and more, we will create a style guide that will combine all the elements and present the visual road for the rest of the project. One thing to note is that the Design phase does not just push the visual elements but also the ‘web design’ portion, which will ensure that the design will seamlessly work on different devices and screen sizes so that the user’s experience is the same across different platforms.

For any website, content is critical, and this doesn’t just mean text but also images, graphics, and videos, so this can be quite a time-consuming process. This includes all product information, photos, and prices to fill your online store and other pages to ensure that all content, old or new, will meet SEO criteria. This way, it will be ranked appropriately after launching the new site. We will create a content plan with you, outlining which content will appear in which part of the site structure. This way, it will be easier to keep track of content production or conversion and be as efficient as possible.

The structure, design and content plan have been completed and handed over to the development team so that everything can be put together in the full version of the site as it will appear on the internet and be visible to users. In most cases, the site’s backend will have a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, allowing editors to manage the web content once the site is live and the eCommerce solution we identified as the best for your project. We will work with you throughout this process, so you and your team can provide feedback. This way, if any changes would be made to match your vision, they could be implemented as the site is built instead of after the fact.

Quality Assurance is a critical stage in the process because it will put the site under stress. We will check for bugs, inconsistencies, dead links, and formatting errors during this phase. We will also rigorously test all aspects of the online store to ensure that all functions work correctly and to prevent any issues once the site goes live. We will also check the site on different devices, in different browsers and platforms, to make sure that it has full functionality across all possible combinations a user may use to access the site. This is a two-fold testing phase, where our web development team will check the technical side, while your team will check for the accuracy of the content and that the site overall correctly represents your brand.

It has been a long time coming, but now your site is finally ready to be unveiled to the general public. If it is a brand new site, it will be put live, and things will be ready to go. If you are replacing a website, however, a few more steps are involved behind the scenes, and it can take some time for all links to point to the new website. It is recommended to have as many people that were involved in the development of the website, your team, and the development team etc. to be available at the time of launch to be ready for potential troubleshooting. Our work does not stop there, though. We will monitor your site for potential technical issues and SEO rankings to ensure that everything and other performance factors are appropriately indexed.