Back

Web Design at 34SP.com

10 March 2009

34SP.com Staff

Hi all! I’m Ali and I’m one of the web designers here at 34SP.com. My role involves getting paid to be arty and techy all day with the occasional splurge of rock band at lunchtimes – it’s fantastic! For my post I’m going to chat to you about what goes on here in the design department and I’ll take you through the stages we go through to create websites for you, our lovely customers.

When you email us with a request for web design, your email will go into our ticketing system. This is where we carry out the majority of our correspondence. Note: If you’re already a customer in correspondence with us, please try to reply to previous tickets rather than starting a new email otherwise we’ll end up with separate tickets scattered all over the place.

Gathering your requirements

The first thing we’ll need from you is your project requirements. This will include:

• how many pages you will need

• whether your site needs to be able to accept online payments

• whether your site needs to be content managed

• if you’d like any flash or dynamic content

To provide you with an accurate quote you need to give us as much detail as possible about your requirements – the longer and more detailed the email the better.

Working up a design

To begin creating a design for you we need to know your design requirements. These include:

• what your preferred colour scheme is

• whether you have a logo or need a logo designing

• whether you prefer rounded (e.g. www.sellyourps360.com) or square (e.g. www.spaconsultant.co.uk) corners

• any existing websites you like the design of

Once we have your design requirements, we start to put together a flat design for you using Illustrator. There are arguments for using Illustrator over Photoshop or Photoshop over Illustrator but personally I find Illustrator much easier to use and more flexible for putting together layouts.

The flat design is free of charge and can be worked on until we get the perfect design for you. Once you’re happy with the design we arrange for a 25% payment of the website design cost and get to work on building it.

Building your website

At present we use Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium for all our creativity, putting together designs in Illustrator, building sites using Dreamweaver, working the animation magic with Flash and tweaking imagery in Photoshop. The majority of the designing and HTML and CSS side of things is done by myself and Simon with Phil stepping in to look after the programming and scripting and to sort out the databases and PHP.

Your approval

Once the site is finished, we’ll let you know so you can go and have a look over and make sure everything is as you expected. When you’re happy, we accept the final 75% payment and make the site live. Of course, every design client receives one year of complimentary business hosting for their account. So once the final payment is completed, we can automatically launch the site for you onto a 34SP.com business hosting account – with no additional hosting payments due for one full year.

So, what else do we do?

What else does a web designer working as 34SP.com spend their day doing you ask? Well, other than frantically emailing or creating websites for you guys, we manage 34SP.com keeping it up to date and in tip top condition, we build various landing pages and supporting imagery for 34SP.com advertising campaigns, we play a little rock band at lunch time in our games room complete with Xbox and full screen wall projector and of course we research all the latest design and SEO techniques to ensure that any websites we produce are the best of the best.

I hope that this post helped you understand the web design process here at 34SP.com. Please contact us in the web design department anytime for design advice, or to work up a quote for your next website or web development project.