Our Design Process

Introduction

Celestial Graphics pays careful attention to the needs of your business and your customers.

Based on these guiding principles, we have developed a design process that helps assure that your project will come in on cost, on schedule and most important meet the needs of your organization and your customers. Of course, every project is different and therefore our design process is adaptable to your needs.

Initial Client Contact and Interview

During our initial interview with you, we will assess your business and your industry. We will help you to distill the goals of your web site or advertising campaign. In addition, we will get an assessment of who your customer is, what there needs are, and what unique benefits your web site can provide for them.

Background Research and Proposal

After our preliminary discussions with you, depending on the scope of the project, we generally do some basic background research of your industry and your competition. We will present you with a proposal that clearly defines the goals of the project and the project deliverables. This document will contain the following information.

Clearly Stated Project Goals
Exactly what we will deliver at the completion of the web site design project.
What material we will need from you and when you will need to deliver them.
If the project is a web site, a description of the content and structure.
Project Schedule
Price Quotation and Terms of the agreement.

Business/ Marketing Plan Development (Larger Project)

If you are a medium or larger organization or nonprofit, you may wish to have us develop a complete web business model and deployment strategy. At this stage, we can develop a web business development and marketing plan.

Concept Development

In order for the project to proceed quickly and efficiently, we create a password protected area for your project. This could either be in the client area of our web site or at your web address.

At this stage, will will develop one or more preliminary concepts for your home page and some typical web site pages. If the project includes an advertising and marketing campaign, we will also develop preliminary concepts for these. You will be able to view the concepts on-line and quickly approve or disapprove them.

If the web site includes a database. We will also develop the basic database schema and site architecture.

Project Development

After you approve the preliminary concepts, we will begin actually building the web site. If the project is large, we will create a project site that contains the project schedule and milestones as well as an area for the teams members to collaborate. We believe in an open development process so you will have complete access to this project site.

Initial Development

During the initial project development phase, we will develop the actual site architecture If the project requires content development, we will also develop and edit the content at this stage.

After the initial development phase, your organization will have the opportunity and comment and suggest changes. If this is a medium or large web site, we will perform usability testing and alter the structure based on the result.

Final Development

During the final development phase, the web site structure and content will be finalized and the site will be completed.

Search Engine Optimization and Analysis

After the site is completed we will perform a search engine analysis using various tools and expertise at our disposal. The content may be adjusted or "tweaked" in order to help gain higher search engine rankings.

Quality Assurance Testing

We are dedicated to providing you with a high quality site.

	We thoroughly test your site for compatibility with Internet Explorer 4, 5, and 6 as well as Netscape 4 and 6.
	We test your site's appearance in 256 color mode and True Color mode (16 million colors). In addition, we test it for compatibility at various monitor resolutions.
	We test your site on both a PCs and Macs.
	We check spelling, grammar and for broken links.

At the end of this step, we provide you with a Quality Assurance Check Sheet.

Project Completion

Now that the site is thoroughly checked, we transfer its content to your final web address. We now submit your site to the search engines. We have received extremely good results (top ten and top five rankings) on several of our sites. We accomplish this through a systematic investigation in order to determine the appropriate target keywords, content and descriptions.

Maintenance

The web is a dynamic medium, depending on your goals, you will most likely what to keep your web site's content fresh. If you choose to have us maintain your web site, we can negotiate a maintenance contract with you.

If you choose to maintain it yourself, we can recommend what software tools you should use. For an additional charge, we can provide training for your employees for maintaining your web site.