How We Work

Website Development Projects

When it comes to building and maintaining a successful website, Five Q has you covered. Over the last 6 years, the staff at Five Q has designed, launched, and supported hundreds of websites. Through hard-fought experience from our team of strategy, design, programming, and management experts, we have developed a process for delivering a great website on time and on budget.

In all honesty, our process is similar to any interactive agency with the same body of experience. What makes Five Q unique is not our process: it is our people and our passion for partnership with you to understand your mission and goals.

Step 0: Partnering for the Long Haul

Step... Zero? It sounds silly, but we firmly believe that the foundation of any successful project is teamwork. "Collaboration" for us is not a marketing buzz word. In our experience, great websites demand dedication, time, and hard work from everyone involved.

So we start our process with a gut check: are we able to give you 110%? If not, we may ask you to delay your project until we can get the right resources in place. We may even recommend other agencies that can do a great job for you. If we cannot deliver our best, we do not even want to start.

In return, we ask the same of our client partners: we are not just building/redesigning a website for your organization; we are building/redesigning a website with your organization.

Step 1: Create the Strategy

Know what you want from your website? Fantastic! We can help you craft a strategy that meets your goals, on time and on budget. Not sure where to start? No problem. Our team has a variety of tools and processes at your disposal to develop your web strategy, including:

Internal and External Audience Surveys: These help capture what your staff and customers think about your current website and their web-related needs.
Rockefeller Habits": A modified version of this classic, time-tested toolset offers a solid action plan for strategic planning.
Competitive Analysis: What your competitors are doing can inform what you should be doing.
Usability Testing: This process helps to seewhat is working, and not working, on your existing website(s).
In-Depth Statistical Web Analysis: If you have analytics tools running on your website, we complete a thorough review of how people are finding your website and what they are doing once they are on it.

Regardless of the tools, the end result is always a clear strategy that includes answers to our core questions:

Who is your audience?
What media draws your attention?
When will you see a return?
Where is your audience going?
How do you build the right team?

Step 2: Turn Strategy Into Blueprints

This is where the real fun begins: taking the strategy and turning into plan of attack. During this "discovery" phase, we develop a series of blueprints to determine answers to functional questions like "what goes on the home page" and "how do we download product orders".

The blueprints Five Q develops in every project include:

The navigation hierarchy (or menus) for the website.
A list of all the URLs (or pages) on the website.
"Wireframes" describing what features appear on the major pages of the website.
A "creative brief" that captures what the design should include: the colors, fonts, logos, and the overall "vibe" of the design.

In addition, we often include other documentation as needed. If we are developing a specialized tool, such as an event registration form, then we would include the database schema that would store the fields.

Step 3: Make It Look Great

Blueprints are important, but seeing your design brings the process to life. For many of us at Five Q (including our programmers), this is our favorite phase of a project.

Our designers do an excellent job facilitating this process, staring with a fact-finding session. They start by reviewing your existing print, online, and branding collateral to undestand your core design style. Then they walk you through existing websites to see what you like... and what you don't like.

Next, they take all of this insight and turn into into a design "comp" -- a picture of what your website will look like. With your feedback, they fine tune the comp until it is just right.

Step 4: Make It Work Great

Concurrent to the design phase is the build out of your website. This is where our production team develops the final, working website. This includes all the behind-the-scene items, such as developing your database and writing the programming. We also help you collect and fine tune your content for the web: images, copy, audio/video, and banners.

While this can be the most stressful part of the process, our project managers will make sure everything stays on track. We often say "don't panic" and we mean it: we have done this before and we will make sure you get to a successful launch. If things do pop up (and they always do), we walk you through the trade offs based on your priorities and budget.

Step 5: Launch!

After all the hard work comes the critical last step: launching your new website! We work with you to get everything polished up, and take care of all the little details. We even keep an eye on things to ensure everything is running smoothly after launch. If something does break, we have you covered with our 30-day warranty.

What comes next?

Launching a website is just the beginning! A website is just a means to an end for advancing your organization's mission. Many of our project clients sign up for our retainer service to keep their website running smoothly and continually improve their web marketing.