Our Process
Creating your next deliverable.
Pride in The Product.
We enjoy this part.
The only thing we love more than our craft is exceeding clients’ expectations. WDG is where business goals and audience needs meet — every completed project stays within the timeline, budget and scope.
Our project and account management teams ensure that working with WDG and navigating third-party vendors is a seamless experience. We take a proactive approach to communicating milestones, key decision points, challenges, and flagging potential project risks proactively.
We work closely and collaboratively with our clients to ensure a smooth project flow, as the quality and success of the products we design and build define our value.
You need to start with a sound strategy to finish a project successfully. Our Strategy Team grasps user behavior and journeys along with KPI metrics to influence information architecture, content hierarchy, and conversion funnels.
Our teams also conduct collaborative UX workshops with clients, exploring brand attributes, organizational voice and tone, and writing for web best practices.
Deliverables include
- Site Audit
- User Journey Exercises
- SWOT Analysis
- Stakeholder Interviews
- User Surveys
- Best Practice Reviews
- Competitive/Comparative Analysis
- SEO/Keyword Research
- Preliminary Sitemap
- ADA Compliance Audit
Strategy Brief
Our strategy briefs distill discovery findings into project goals and objectives, based on the needs of the client’s brand, business and audience.
Organizing content for intuitive wayfinding is paramount for an optimal user experience. We take a close look at past user behavior, current and future desired content structures, along with industry best practices. This enables us to ensure that the content is well formatted and easily accessible on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Our IA and UX teams work closely with clients through iterative refinements of the site-map to identify content that needs to be migrated, rewritten, nixed, or created.
Wireframing
Wireframes are created by our UX team to establish content patterns and visual content hierarchy from an interface perspective. We take the nature of the content into consideration and brainstorm the most effective ways to display it to the user.
We consider navigation implications across all devices. We create rapid interactive prototypes to ensure that our interface recommendations meet their goals.
The wireframing phase of a redesign project is also an ideal time for targeted user-testing. We conduct user tests ourselves or provide prototypes for our clients to conduct A/B, Multivariate, or “Lorem Ipsum” tests.
Once we know that the intended interface is structurally and hierarchically sound and that the wayfinding methods are in place, we are ready to start incorporating visuals and branding assets in the visual design phase.
Meeting our goals outlined in the Strategy Brief is our primary focus through every phase of the project. Our recommendations culminate during the visual design phase when we take the lead to work closely with our clients as we explore the most appropriate path to bring their brand to life.
Everything we design is intended to be an honest representation of the brand that resonates with our clients’ target audiences. Our visual design process eliminates surprises, as we take our clients on an aesthetic exploration to identify possible approaches.
Brand Attributes Exercise
We conduct a workshop with our clients to reveal the values and key attributes associated with the brand. This exercise helps clarify the voice, tone and overall perception of the brand from the audience’s perspective, and vice versa. This exercise provides our design team with parameters for design exploration.
Design Exploration
Our first aesthetic deliverable comes in the form of Style Scapes - a set of aesthetic exploration based on the brand attributes and reflective of key content patterns as identified in the wireframes. Style Scapes allow our design team to explore approaches of typography, color variation, image treatments, and design elements. There is usually a safe option, an alternate option exploring a conceptual approach, and an option that pushes the envelope while remaining on brand and appropriate for the target audiences.
Approved Design Direction
We present our carefully-crafted Style Scapes to our clients and collect feedback about the elements that are resonating, as well as those that are not. This feedback is vital as it is the basis for our design direction. We apply this direction as we flesh out the design comps in preparation for development.
WDG relies on a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving and our senior development team is an essential part of this process. Our developers are onboarded early on, providing strategic and technical insights and leadership throughout the project.
Our developers are active contributors to both the WordPress and Drupal open source communities, and adept at customizing existing plugins to extend their capabilities to match very specific technical requirements. They also excel in leveraging third party APIs to create custom functionality.
Technical Leadership
WDG developers perform technical discovery alongside the strategy and design teams to identify technical challenges and opportunities, refine requirements, and manage 3rd party vendors and/or integrations. Together, your technical lead and project manager will ensure that your project goals are top of mind and never obscured by multi-vendor cross-talk.
CMS Implementation
During the development phase, we will install and configure the CMS software and plugins on a development site. We will also build out the sitemap and content model, and customize the admin user interface.
Launch to Development Server
WDG will launch the site to a development environment where it can be reviewed for QA, training, and content entry.
key challenges include
- Product Road-Mapping
- CMS Development
- Front-end Development
- Search Integration
- Taxonomy Structures
- Accessibility Compliance
- SSO + API Integrations
- Plugin-Configurations
- Content Migration
- Quality Assurance Testing
We believe in doing things the right way.
Our multi-disciplined team will work hand-in-hand to create the best possible solutions are brought forward to accomplish our clients’ most challenging digital needs.
This includes a thorough QA process towards the end of a build that helps ensure a long-lasting partnership with each client.
key development challenges include
- Technical Code Review
- Design Accuracy + Integrity
- Requirements Review
- Training + Content Entry
- Client Quality Acceptance Testing