website documentation and consultations Our documentation and consulting services essentially involves the process of planning and documenting your website and its development.
By following this process, it can help us and our clients sort out things such as: important objectives that the website has to achieve, work out which technologies and functionality to use, navigation and design style, which things to include and what not to include and allows business owners to plan for future visions and maintenance of the site.
Without this process website developments typically run into problems. Elements that have been "forgotten" or are "changed" as the design and development has progressed, usually are alot harder implement at a later date, and are more likely to result in a additional development cost as the time taken to complete the new changes will need to be considered. We often say its alot like building a house, if you get the foundations and the plan right to begin with its more robust and cost-effective than adding bits on here and there later that you haven't allowed for.
The documentation we provide, allows YOU and US to see the overall picture before work begins and enables us to make decisions and changes without having to worry about changing graphics code and templates (other than on paper). It helps you as the business owner have intimate knowledge of how the site will work and integrate together before work any development begins.
It also allows you to assess and prepare various bits of information such as: content and text, perhaps there are categories you need to come up with (or we can identify if we need to do this), or product shots you need to sourced, maybe even form information that needs to be compiled before work begins.
Part of the consultation is where we prepare what we call a "whitesite" which is essentially a detailed documented view of the key elements for the majority if not all pages of your site.
During this process we will utilise our knowledge of coding, layout, usability, technologies and functionality to determine how the sections and pages will integrate together in the best possible way.
If you need to have forms or capture information from your customers we will supply whitesite mockups of the pages which will ensure we capture all of the correct form fields and are containing all of the information you require. If you are having community profiles or features we will need to work out how registrations, forgotten passwords pages will work and how community members will interact. As well as an admin area to allow you manage your users. For an example of a whitesite page layout diagram see the example on the left.
By placing all the elements in a document this way we can see how a customer would travel through the website perhaps we may recognise the need for more navigation items or we may come up with ideas for functionality, there are many advantages to the process one of the main ones being that we can start to of the identify and resolve issues or problems before development has started and incorporate that into your foundation. For you it also means you can begin to sort out how your content will be managed in terms of updating, sourcing and ongoing support of the website.
So what do you get?
With this service you get our expertise advice and years of experience in the planning of your website ensuring that it it is planned in such as way as to meet your and your customers needs. As well this, you get a detailed Document Specification of the website which details everything the site will contain: functionality, pages (whitesite), design, navigation. We will also include a quotation which outlines development costs, terms, timelines etc.
As you can imagine the time it takes to compile this sort of information can be involved and time consuming especially if you have a large and complicated site so this is why there is a fee for this service.
On delivery of the final document you will also receive an invoice which is payable within 7 days. Once full payment is received the document is yours to keep. If you have in-house staff or a particular designer you would like to use you are obviously free to hand the document over to them which allows them to have a clear idea of the plan for your site.
If you decide get us to develop your website based on the specification we have provided we will give you a 10% discount on your website development. (As it will be alot easier for us to develop as we won't need to spend time sitting down with you to work out what it is you need).
Alternatively, if you wish to provide all of the above information yourself, we are happy for you to do this but please be aware that there maybe further detailed information that we may require you to provide in order to quote and work from particularly for large database and content management systems.
Cost
We provide a free quotation and consultation via email (or phone) at putting your documentation together.
The cost for the final document will depend on the scope of your website and how long it will take for us to document all of the pages etc.
For smaller basic HTML websites we may not need to document the layout of all the pages of the site and may just go with a couple of pages which the other pages will follow. This type of site we generally waive the cost of the development specification if you decide to go with us for the development. If you wish to hand our document to other developers or designers or in-house team then you will be invoiced for our time. Generally go by a fixed quote based on a $66 per hour cost or at a daily rate.
Due to the nature of this service we require payment of this service within 7 days. If you decide to go with us for your development then a 10% discount will be offered on your website development.
If you would like to see an example of on of our whitesites or specifications contact us for further enquiries.
If you are interested in seeing the conditions of our Service and Maintenance Agreement please request a copy by emailing:
