PIER’s approach to your website project

ADVERTISING FEATURE

By PIER Marketing

At PIER, we often refer to websites as the “nerve centre” of your marketing activity: it’s the place where customers and potential customers find you, learn about you, form impressions, purchase products, make bookings and plenty more.

With your website playing such a huge role in your business, it’s essential that it’s driven by sound research and strategy — in other words, that it functions exactly how you need it to and resonates with the people you’re trying to target.

Whether you need a simple brochure site or something with sophisticated booking functionality, your website should be purpose-built and designed to meet your business goals. Our team build bespoke, fully responsive websites that range from simple and informative, to complex and interactive sites with a variety of functionality.

So, what does the process of developing a website actually look like?

We have a carefully considered (yet always evolving) methodology when it comes to website projects. We work with our in-house web developer, designers and copywriters to operate in four main stages: Design (user experience, sitemap, wireframes, user interface, brand application); Building (development, testing, launch); Post-Launch (promotion, training, search engine optimisation) and Maintenance and Support (security, updates, ongoing testing).

Here’s a closer look at our website project process.

Workshop

We start by meeting with you to better understand both your users and your business goals. In this workshop, we’ll likely ask you the following questions:

• What are your business goals (for example, to secure bookings, sell product, lead generation, educate users etc.)?
• Who are your user groups?
• From these user groups, who are your ideal or priority customers?
• What does each user group need from your website, and what are their priorities?

If you have an existing site, we’ll also take a look at your Google Analytics data to gain an understanding of how it is currently performing.

User Experience (UX)

Website UX is all about how users flow through the site and whether your audience can seamlessly navigate their way around and easily access what they’re looking for.

From the insights gained in the workshop, we spend additional time getting in the minds of your users to identify what experience they want from using your site. We then align these findings with your business objective so the website structure, language, design and functionality all cater to the user’s expectations.

Sitemap and Wireframes

A sitemap is essentially a roadmap where we can begin to envision, based on what’s been established in our UX research, what the site structure and hierarchy of pages should look like (in other words, what information is most important to your users, and how it should be communicated).

The wireframes are where we begin to bulk out the sitemap — laying out each page’s hierarchy of information, architecture and functionality — and see how it all fits together.

User Interface (UI) Design and Copywriting

Your website is a branding tool as much as it is anything else. Once the bare bones of your site are in place, we roll out your branding across the site using tailored graphic design with complementary copywriting.

Website UI is all about aesthetics. We apply your brand in a way that makes your website look and feel attractive to the audience – from colour palettes and imagery to typography and beyond. If a website feels familiar, natural and intuitive to users, it will evoke a positive response and keep them engaged.

Development, Testing and Launch

We build your site in a staging environment, and then we test it to ensure it looks and works as planned before we shift into live mode.

Then, for the really exciting bit. We push your new website from the testing environment into the real world (your live domain/URL). We’re live, baby!

Post Launch

But wait! That’s not all. It’s not enough for a website to just look pretty: it also needs to show up in internet search results. We make sure the text and imagery used on your website aligns with the latest best practice for search engine optimisation so that your target audience can easily find you.

Plus, we install Google Analytics on all websites we build so that you can analyse and understand how much traffic is landing on your website, where your users come from and what they’re clicking on.

Maintenance

The digital landscape changes all the time — internet browser updates, software updates, security changes etcetera — and your website must be regularly maintained in order to operate smoothly.

We take the time to train your team so that you can perform minor updates and changes to your site as required (such as adding a new team member or updating an image).

In terms of ongoing maintenance, our team keep your site up-to-date and issue free with maintenance plans. This means automatic monitoring and tasks performed monthly, quarterly or as needed.

If you’d like to chat, drop us a line.