Welcome to PEC Consulting!




We are a business solutions provider located in West Cork, Ireland, with clients throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom. We specialize in web design, ETL consultancy and training, and small business management.

PEC Consulting Web Design Process

The purpose of this document is to make transparent the entire process by which PEC Consulting creates a website and how the consultation process with the customer works. Customer consultation is an absolutely vital part of creating any website - it ensures that we are not wasting our time by developing material that will not be approved, and it gives the customer confidence that their hard-earned cash is being put to good use! It's good to feel involved in a project as important as a website, even if you have no technical known-how, and ultimately the customer is the one who has to be satisfied with the end product, so we try to keep you involved and giving feedback at any stage possible.

A lot of attention is given to the stage of project definition. This is because the decisions made at this point will affect all subsequent design and development. If a website has been almost fully completed, it's too late at that point to decide that in fact a different technology needs to be used, or a different "tone" should be set for the entire site. The more thought is spent in defining a project initially, the less time will be spent later in re-designing and re-developing.

We have obligations to our customers to provide them with a website that matches our agreement with them - likewise, our customers have obligations to us to follow the process we have set out and not to spring any last-minute surprises. Obviously it is possible at any point in the process to make minor adjustments, but customers need to be aware that once the general layout and colour scheme and visuals have been designed and development has begun, any major changes of mind which involve redesigning work which has already been completed will be extra to the agreed-upon price for the project. We are not going to be unreasonable about this - minor changes are part and parcel of the ongoing feedback process. However, any major changes that should have happened at an early point in the design process will be chargeable at our normal hourly rate. Sticking to this process is how we are able to offer such competitive and attractive rates to customers, and we know through experience that not sticking to the process creates headaches and wasted time for everyone involved.

The four stages of our process are:.

  1. Definition
  2. Design
  3. Development
  4. Delivery
  1. Definition

    1. Customer provides answers to an initial list of questions designed to elicit a detailed yet general idea of what kind of site they are looking for. In some cases this will be our first contact with the client (if they have filled out the questionnaire form on our home page).

      If the customer is not sure about any of the items on the questionnaire, that's okay. They can simply say "not sure" and that part can be clarified later on in our communication. The questions are as follows:

      1. Client contact details (we ideally want to be in touch with just one person for the duration of the project)
      2. New site or redesign of existing one? If it is a redesign, please provide URL or the existing site.
      3. Who is the target audience?
      4. Desired outcome of site? i.e. Increase sales, provide information, promote brand awareness, etc.
      5. Nature of business
      6. Ecommerce needed? Roughly how many products?
      7. Deadline? Budget? These figures are to provide a rough idea only and are not final.
      8. Need for new visual materials (eg logo, photographs) or will these be provided?
      9. Search Engine Optimization - what level?
      10. General look and feel - any preferred colour scheme and/or layout?
      11. Integrate existing marketing designs? Some designs that look very good on paper do not fare so well as websites; others work perfectly.
      12. Any admired websites? What about them is liked or to be emulated?
      13. Any competitor's websites - what about them is liked/not liked?
      14. Can the customer maintain the site after completion, or is ongoing maintenance needed?
      15. What pages specifically are required? Does not have to be absolutely all of them but a general idea of number and type of pages is needed - About, contact, history, products, etc.
      16. Interactive elements? Forum, blogs, chat, media streaming, user logins, forms, etc.
      17. Domain hosting/registration - does the customer already own a domain or do they need one? Will we provide hosting or will they deal with that themselves?
    2. Based on this initial input, we will come up with a quote for the project which will usually be a range, and we will narrow the range based on subsequent back-and-forth between us and the customer.
    3. When we come back to them from their initial answers, we will be trying to pin down exact definitions in the following areas:
      1. Exact target market
      2. Important characteristics of this market (e.g. web-savvy, uses broadband, elderly, etc)
      3. Localization issues (spelling and currency etc)
      4. Rate competing sites:
        1. Is the purpose of the site clear?
        2. Does the site clearly address a particular audience?
        3. Is the site useful and relevant to its audience?
        4. Is the site interesting and engaging?
        5. Does the site enable users to accomplish all the tasks they need or want to accomplish?
        6. Can these tasks be accomplished easily?
        7. Is the information organized in a way that users will expect and understand?
        8. Is the most important information easiest to find?
        9. Is textual information clear, grammatically correct, and easy to read?
        10. Do you have a clear idea of what the site contains?
        11. Do you always know where you are, and how to get where you want to go?
        12. Is the presentation attractive?
        13. Do pages load quickly enough?
        14. Do they achieve a good search engine ranking for relevant keywords?
      5. We then know whose sites we are up against
      6. What is the message or mission of the site?
      7. Tone - fun? Serious? Shocking? Trendy? Etc
      8. What level of technical information about, for example, products? Will this be provided by the customer or is there research required by us?
      9. Ecommerce - how will this part of the site work? Simple, per-product pricing, or are there selectable elements (e.g. packaging, sizes) which affect price?
        10. Shopping cart? Shipping options? Prominence of ecommerce options - e.g. permanent shopping cart link on every page, or totally separate shopping area?
      10. What technologies are best suited to the task - e.g. PHP and MySQL and CSS, Javascript, Flash
      11. Clear agreement on what content the client will provide
      12. Agreement on exact, or fairly exact, number of pages, products, photos.
      13. Agreement on other features to be used, level of optimization, and deadline for delivery
    4. Internal discussion at PEC Consulting about required skills, technologies and development time.
    5. We now agree on a price for the entire project based on all the above
    6. Customer sends ALL materials - we do not proceed without all required visual and textual content.
  2. Design
    1. Visual
      1. Colour schemes and layouts presented to customer in images or very basic mock web pages
      2. How many options for layout and colours probably depends on how many differing thoughts customer has had, and how many competing sites were admired. This will affect the final price - fewer options means less work.
      3. Feedback process modifying colours and layouts until customer is satisfied
      4. Photos resized and retouched if necessary, logo provided or created and agreed upon
      5. Do not proceed until all visual elements have been agreed upon.
    2. Technical Architecture
      1. Site walkthrough designed - text-only web pages with plain hyperlinks. This is to establish the general site navigation. Any advanced navigation features cannot be included (e.g. javascript menus, flash animations, DHTML elements)
      2. Customer feedback and agreement on this architecture.

  3. Development

    Once development has begun, then any major reversion to the design process will be chargeable at the normal hourly rate on top of the agreed project price, so it is in everyone's interest to complete the Design phase properly before continuing.

    1. Main pages developed
    2. Customer feedback on these
    3. Sub-pages, ecommerce pages developed
    4. Customer feedback on these
    5. Any other remaining site elements developed
    6. Final phase of customer feedback
    7. Optimization of site for search engines (to some extent this has to be borne in mind all the way through, but the final adjustments are done at this point)
  4. Delivery
    1. Mailboxes for any relevant email addresses (e.g. info@domainname.com, sales@domainname.com) are created.
    2. All elements (pages, databases etc) are switched to the "live" domain name.
    3. Submission to search engines and directories if that is part of agreement
    4. We all sit back and watch the traffic!