Project management - why SitesToGo is different

44% of businesses in a recent ISME survey found that 'building a website was a frustrating and confusing experience', and 41% felt that 'web designers tried to confuse them with jargon'

Download the ISME ebusiness survey 2008 here in pdf format

Well it does not have to be like that. The award winning SitesToGo web building process is rather simple. A jargon free zone. Understanding your business is our priority. Most sites take around 4-6 weeks to complete, but your agenda is our agenda.

Here is what happens:

First contact
You contact us or we contact you by telephone or email. Or it may be at a training or networking event. This is our opportunity to find out more about your business and your specific needs so we will ask for 5-10 minutes of your time to put us in the picture.

Budget outline quote
Most people want an idea of the budget needed before spending more time with us. Our initial quote will be a summary of costs based upon assumptions from our initial discussion and may be amended as the project is discussed in more depth.

Advisory meeting
The first meeting is free and without any obligation. One of our advisors will meet with you in person, or by teleconference if you prefer, for about an hour.

Firm quote or proposal
A more precise definition of the project, highlighting relative cost benefit of each feature. 2-3 working days after the advisory meeting. A few days after the firm quotation we will call you to seek acceptance or to discuss a timescale for further contact.

Acceptance
Once our proposal is accepted we will:

• Agree a navigation plan for the site
• Agree and register domain names if necessary
• Agree design and identity parameters
• Agree a timetable for the work
• Request home page text (or write it if we are required to)
• Send you an invoice for the full project costs. Half of this is due before commencement and can be paid by cheque, bank transfer or credit card.

Design and copywriting
We will then:

• Brief the graphic designer and (if required) a copywriter.
• We may call you at this time to clarify parameters and to ask for graphics such as logos, existing artwork and photos. Or your preference for stock graphics
• About a week later we will show you 2-4 initial design concepts as jpegs. You will be asked to choose one approach and suggest changes
• 3-5 days later we will show you the final design for approval before coding commences
• Rarely more stages of design may be required, we will always advise you first if subsequent changes or rebriefing will increase the cost of your website design as agreed
• Once design is approved it will be applied to your site - changes to the template after approval may result in extra costs

Page content
During the design process we will ask you to supply page content - text and graphics - in electronic form for all pages of the site. If we are writing text for you this will be sent to you for approval and/or amendment

Site review and approval
Once all available content has been added to the website we will ask you to review the content and layout. We will identify further content that is needed to complete the site.
Once you are happy with the website we will request payment of the second half before the site is made live on the domain of your choice.,
You will have a period of 10 working days in which to review and request amendments, or send more content, after which the site will be deemed to have been accepted and full payment will become due.

Quality audit
Your complete site is subjected to our quality assurance check, this includes technical criteria, spelling and usability.

Update training
Once the site is live we schedule a telephone training session to show you how simple it is to update and manage your new website, and how to access our support desk whenever you need advice or help