My approach to building websites with you is entirely collaborative with communications frequently to keep you involved and informed.
From the beginning Steve undertakes to always provide a written proposal for you which will usually include:
- a fixed price;
- a clear non-technical description of the scope of all work to be undertaken;
- a description of the approach I will take to complete this work in conjunction with yourself;
- a timescale;
- a description of any services to be secured on your behalf e.g. domain name registration, hosting facilities etc including the costs for these services;
- an optional price for maintenance if required;
- a clear description of any dependencies on you, such as the provision of any images you may need to provide.
Delivery will always be broken into clearly identifiable stages with appropriate testing at every stage. Progression to the next stage will not take place until you, my customer, are happy with everything I provide. You will be able to view and test each stage of the delivery as appropriate.
Depending upon the scale of the work you may not need to make any payment until final delivery and testing of your site - i.e. until you are completely satisfied.
Responsive Design - "Mobile" sites
Any web site built for you will be a responsive site by default. This means that the site adapts to the device on which the it is being presented. These devices broadly fall into the following categories:
- PCs/Larger Laptops
- Netbooks/Smaller Laptops/Tablets
- Smartphones
- Text only sites - for accessibility for example, wherever possible we build in accessibility features to the site design
In general (though not always) the exact same text content is presented on all devices but in a different styling. In general images are presented differently (different sizes for example) or in some cases they are omitted depending on the size of the device. A different header may be presented on different devices but overall the site will usually contain the same information.
Sites updated by you
The default approach for all but the smallest static sites is to build a site that can be updated and extended by the customer so that you are in control. This reduces your dependency on a third party to maintain the site for you - but Steve is always there to help if required. A detailed instruction manual is provided to help you plus an optional illustrated help sheet, but don't worry, it's straight forward.
I will only build static non responsive web sites for very small orders or where you have instructed me to do so - my default approach is to build a responsive web site which can be kept up to date by yourself. Of course, I will always be there to maintain the site if you require me to.