A brief, put simply, is a conversation where you tell the designer what you want. The designer in turn needs to identify these requirements, extract and identify needs, wants and possibilities for a prospective website.

Let's take a case study. John is a small business owner, an SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise) and he wants a website. Great. Where do we start...?

John owns a small business calls Smith Shoes and serves a small local community. However, he wants a website because he feels he can grow his market and sell more shoes.

A quotation is provided following the initial consultation and quite simply contains information that controls the project from start to finish.

A typical website design will include the purchase of a domain name, template design or selection, manipulation of the design to the clients' satisfaction and content loading.

Some of these are our responsability and others yours. This can be project specific or general but each project receives the same documentation at the start and the same attention. Typical documents include:

Again, just like it says on the tin, this step is the actual design process.

Sometimes this is done without the client's intervention, sometimes as a partnership. It's actually a fluid concept based on how much time the client would like to invest in the design of their website and also how big the project actually is.

The bigger the site, the higher the cost. The more time the client is willing to invest, the lower the cost.

This can be a simple copy and paste or as complex as a hand written solution to integrate data from other websites that the client already owns.

If the design is the skeleton then at this stage we are putting the meat on the bones and creating something you can walk around and work with, it's almost a functioning website and is almost ready to deliver on an unsuspecting public...!

This is usually the point when a website goes live. The project is handed over to the client in its entirety or, more usually, we maintain the website on an ongoing basis. Why...?

Remember our case study...? John, the Cobbler. He's a Cobbler, not a website designer, he needs someone at the end of a phone or an e-mail that he can contact and ask to update his website.

Our maintenance contracts are typically 12 months and we have many clients that have used our services for a number of years. This in itself speaks volumes. However, a much stronger agument for asking someone else to maintain your website is that the person in question, us, are specialists in what we do. You are a specialist also... In what you do.