Professional Web Design & Development

Web Design & Development is one of our core service areas here at Cloudburst, and whether it’s starting from scratch on a new website design project, or just updating the look & feel of your current website, we make sure your web presence helps distinguish you from your competition, and conveys the best image and brand for your business. We pride ourselves on designing & build stunning professional websites that are created & customized with each client (and their customers) in mind. All the web design & development projects we launch are incredibly easy for our clients to maintain over time, so they can manage the content and make updates whenever they need to without any additional costs! We also ensure that the websites we build can be found by search engines & potential customers by implementing the most up to date Search Engine Optimization techniques & best practices to get you listed as high as possible in the organic search results of Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and others. We figure there is no point in building websites that people can’t find, so this is a standard service that we include on every website project we take on!

Our Web Design & Development Process

STRATEGY & REQUIREMENTS:
Every web design & development project we take on begins with close communication with the client and in-depth research to identify high-level goals and business objectives, which ultimately drive the website features & functional site requirements for the web design project.  We like to think of this as the foundation for everything that comes later in the project, and it’s a critical step in delivering a successful web design project for our clients. For larger web design & development projects, these functional requirements are followed by detailed wireframes of the site layout to determine the overall site structure, and ensure that all the functional requirements are accounted for in the website design.  The details can get a bit technical, but we like to makes things as easy as possible for our clients, and help guide them into the best possible decisions for their web design & development projects.

SITE DESIGN & CREATIVE:
The creative design phase of each web design project builds directly off the site wireframes, and we generally like to propose/present at least three different creative designs to our clients for their review.  These web design creative options may vary stylistically from each other to highlight how visual changes affect the overall experience on the site, and to appeal to different segments of their website visitors.  Based on feedback & client input on the web design creative options, several rounds of revisions follow where we hammer out the details of the design, and dial everything in to get the site looking/feeling exactly the way our clients hoped it would.

WEB DEVELOPMENT & CODING:
Once we have sign off on the creative direction of the web design project, we are able to begin the more technical development phase of the project.  The Photoshop designs are sliced and diced into standards compliant XHTML/CSS pages, templates, and frameworks that will actually serve as the website pages and layouts, and hosting/testing server environments are setup to develop the web design project.  At this point, the site has completely restricted access to only our developers, and our clients once it’s time for an initial site review.  For new web design projects, we build and launch a slick landing page design that serves as a placeholder and announces the new site launch.  For clients with existing websites, we build and develop the website project alongside their existing site, but still completely hidden to the general public as well as search engines.

CROSS-BROWSER TESTING & SITE LAUNCH:
At this stage of the web design project, we do extensive cross-browser testing to insure that your website looks and functions exactly the same across all major browsers and operating systems. This includes Windows, Mac, and Linux for operating systems, and all major browsers including IE7+, FireFox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.  Once the web design project has passed all these tests and has been reviewed & approved by the client, we implement a “Go-Live” strategy for the website, and then do a thorough Post Live Verification (PLV) process for the web design project to be sure that all website functionality, graphics and content are working as they should!

SEO, Facebook, Mobile Browsers & more

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical component of every web design & development project, and we make it a point to implement the most current SEO best practices and techniques on every site we build.  After all…what’s the point having a website that your customers can’t find?  We also implement functionality within your website that makes for a more branded and consistent experience when you & your visitors share links on Facebook, including creating a custom icon of your logo that appears in the Facebook stream for any shared pages/links, and detailed descriptions of your content that appear on Facebook as well.  Mobile Browsers are also a huge priority for us on every web design project we take on. More and more people use mobile devices to browse the web every single day, and we make sure that every site we build is displayed properly on mobile devices like iPhones, Android, and Blackberries.  Our goal for every single web design project we take on is to create the best possible website & user experience within the specified client budget.