If you're new to managing a Drupal project, or web design project in general, this page should give you a bit more of an idea about how things work when you hire us for your site.
Web design
Our process for creating a new design for a client's website involves three stages. Those stages are discovery, creative, and review. This helps us get a good feel for your needs and requirements, and allows us to be creative with the design best suited for the type of content and users of your site.
Discovery
The discovery stage is all about you – the client. We focus on your business needs and how they relate to your customers or visitors. Through our questionnaire and discussion, we gain an understanding of the main goals of the site and the main purpose behind the redesign of the site. Once we have a solid understanding of why the new design needs to exist, who it is focused on, and how we should get there, we then begin the creative stage.
Creative
The creative stage is about taking the ideas and information we discussed during the discovery stage and translating that into a working design. With the help of wireframes and outlines we are able to start developing a design around the ideas we have been presented and have discovered. With any design project, creating wireframes for at least the most important 1-2 pages will help to reduce costs in revisions of the full design mockups.
Review
The review stage is all about the feedback received from you regarding the creative stage and how the design looks in relation to what was outlined in the discovery stage. This is the final stage that incorporates the discovery and creative phase and allows us to revisit both at the same time.
Based on feedback from the you about the design and direction, we revise as needed. We provide you with our input and ideas, and based on your feedback, we collaborate to complete the discovery and creative stage to deliver final mockups of the site.
The review stage typically includes 2-3 revisions of the original mockup design. These are minor revisions such as changing colors, typography, images, and menu items. The structure would remain the same as outlined by the wireframe, so these are generally minor stylistic changes. Our estimates include such time for revisions, and the number of mockups needed vary for each project.
If you would like to explore a completely new direction with the design concept, another round of the creative stage may be added to the project with your approval of the additional hours. We will always show you the mockups as soon as possible. This gives you the opportunity to review the design early and often, and make sure we are both headed in the right direction.
Deliverables
We provide you with a layered Photoshop file of the design. This layered Photoshop file is the same file we use to develop your theme and graphics from. This allows you to easily make changes to the design and incorporate that into the theme for future changes on the site.
Drupal theming
Once we have a design to work from, we can begin the theming process. We can create a Drupal theme from a set of mockups in Photoshop or other graphics software, your existing website, or a theme/template from another web platform. Note that Photoshop mockups are ideal, and mockups in other formats such as PDFs or JPGs may require additional project time.
The theming process typically includes 2-3 phases depending on the complexity of the design and the client's development environment.
We begin with developing a theme locally on our own system and build out the basic outline and styling provided by the mockups. Regions, general typography, backgrounds, etc. are the first thing to be styled. The Skinr module plays a big role in the themes we develop so we go through the mockup in great detail and pick out different styling elements that are repeated and begin grouping them into logical styles. Once we have the basics in place and the Skinr styles created we then move the theme to the client's development server and continue our development there.
It is recommended at this point that the client has a fully working Drupal install with as much content as possible. The client is responsible for building out the site and adding the necessary content and blocks to the site and this also assists with our theme development as the styles can be applied to actual content rather than placeholders. At this point we will also go over how and when to apply Skinr styles to the content on the site so you may assist with applying styles throughout the site as needed.
At this point we continue developing the theme based on the mockups and the provided content on the development server. Once the theme is complete and all styles are in place, we then begin cross-browser testing. We normally perform our testing in the latest releases of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and Internet Explorer 8-9. We'll give your site a quick review in Internet Explorer 7, but full IE6 and IE7 support are no longer part of our standard services. This browser listing can change based on your specific requirements so be sure to mention that before we get to this stage in the process.
Once cross-browser testing and fixes have been completed, and your site configuration is complete... everything is ready to go live!