The first step is to talk. We must get to understand your requirements completely. The web-builder tools we use are very powerful, but they don't suit all applications.

Our initial discussions can be either face-to-face or virtually. For face-to-face meetings, we will travel to you in either the Bournemouth or Southampton areas; of course, we can travel further, but you will need to reimburse our travel cost.

To make the meeting more effective, we will first send you a design pack with relevant, non-technical information on web site layout and the concepts you might want to understand. We will also ask you to think about specific points, such as which areas of your business you want to showcase in the final design. The design pack will include a questionnaire for you to work through to help formulate your ideas. There is no pass or fail mark; we simply wish to help generate your thoughts.

We will also ask you to list your top web sites to give us some idea of the things that have influenced you.

Following our initial meeting, we will send you a proposal for the work. The proposal will include several important elements; we encourage you to read everything:

1. A summary of our discussion, including highlighted points
2. Our price for undertaking the works as described
3. Our price for additional features such as domain purchase, hosting etc
4. An estimate of the time that we expect the new site will take to build
5. Details of our ongoing support for the services 

Of course, we hope that we answered all of your questions in our proposal, but no doubt you will have thought of something that we didn't. So the next step is to go through any questions you may have; this might result in us sending you a revised proposal.

The one thing that we have learned is that no question is stupid. Your expertise is in your business, and our's is in our business. We much prefer to deal with your questions before we agree, rather than wait until we're partway through development to find that we misunderstood you.

Once you are ready to place your trust in us, we will send you an electronic contract. This document will define our agreed services and ask for you to sign your acceptance of the agreement.

We usually use an electronic signature service for this agreement; this protects both parties and saves time posting documents. However, we understand that digital services like this do not suit everyone, so there will be nothing wrong with printing a copy of the agreement for your wet ink signature and popping it into the post box.

We believe that creativity has two sides; we need your vision combined with our technical ability to create your digital dream. To achieve this, we want to develop in the open, which means you need to see the site as it grows and be involved in its design. 

We've created our Developer Web portal to give you password-protected access to the development site throughout the process. We also provide you with the following features:

1. Development Site - You will have access to your developing web site.
2. Timeline - Our graphical timeline gives you a clear idea of timescales and shows when we get to each new development stage. 
3. Task List - We use an interactive task list to help drive the site forwards. Both you and we can update the task list with activities that need action on either side. This simple feature helps us all to keep track of the development process. 
4. Memo Pad - We use the memo pad to exchange thoughts and ideas. The memo pad is used differently from the task list; this area is a single page of text to write what is on our minds and exchange ideas openly. We have found this to be more efficient than email exchange because both sides have access to a single coherent list of ideas. 
5. Web Site Annotations - As we develop your web site, we will use numbered annotations on the development pages to highlight areas where we would like your feedback. You can see how this looks in the image above right. You click each numbered bubble to read the notes that we've left for you. You will then reply with your thoughts using the memo pad.
6. File Upload Area - You will want to include your own content on the site, words, images and maybe even video. These files can become rather large, making them difficult to email. We provide two means of transferring files to us. Smaller files can be uploaded directly through your development portal, whereas for larger files, we provide a Microsoft SharePoint link to upload directly to the cloud. 

Our first steps in the development process are to lay down a theme, structure and add sample content. We will develop several pages around your showcase requirements.

Following these first steps, we will invite you to view the early development and get your feedback. We will hold this initial feedback session virtually using Microsoft Teams so that we can screen share. If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Teams, don't worry, we have made a tutorial for you explaining the process.

It is at this stage that you may make significant changes to various design points. That is the initial review's purpose; what we have in our mind might not be quite what we ultimately want.

During the initial development, we might hold more than one review. Of course, there are limits to the value of multiple review sessions, but this might be the best way to refine our design.