When creating a website it takes more than flashy graphics and cool effects to make your website successful . Many years of experience in the application development field has evolved into a working system for efficiently producing consistently appealing and effective websites.

Research:

The first step is to set up an initial meeting with a representative or designer from the web development company to discuss your thoughts, your ideas, about what you would like in your website. During this meeting we familiarize ourselves with your business image and desired goals for the web page.

After the first meeting, the designer will have noted and confirmed your design specifications you have requested. You (the client) will be responsible for graphics, video and text content material to populate the site with. If you provide your designer the material, and thoroughly discuss the site before it is started you will save time and money, and the site will look better. If you have an idea of how you want the site designed, give your designer a sketch. The following are items to consider;

• Web site content information.
• Functionality (flow between web pages within the site, how to contact you etc.)
• The look and feel of the site. (Graphics, colors and visual effects)

Design:

At Sunset Software Services, our goal is to design an environment which is user-friendly with considerations for easy navigability, visually appealing, informative content and download speed. This is done by using consistent colours, fonts, page headers and navigation bars. The web designer(s) consider the content supplied text, logos, photographs, diagrams etc. and develops some different page layout possibilities.

Development:

Once the specifications have been approved the web designer(s) will then proceed to create what is called an "Alpha" or first version of your website. From that point, the web designer(s) will show or make available this first version for you to review. You will review the web site and send recommended changes back to the designer. This is known as the "Q&A" (Questions & Answers) process. There may be many of these "Q&A" sessions before the final version is attained.

Quality Control:

Upon completion of the web site, our quality control team will perform a final quality control checklist on each webpage and have the client review and verify the accuracy, functionality, design, and content of the site before promoting the site to the web. This includes testing on various browsers as well.

Promotion:

Once the client approves the site, it is then ready to be released to the public. In order to have a website available for other web users to see, you must have somewhere to store the website code or programs. This is referred to as "Web Hosting". There are local companies or companies on the web which provide this service. The costs will vary with the amount of disk space and traffic required by your website. Normally websites do not take up a large amount of space and you can subscribe to the lower costing options with a "Web Hosting" company. Once you have an account setup with the "Web Hosting" company, your website (computer programs) will be transferred to the web hosting company's server (computer where the programs are stored for the rest of the world to see). It is then submitted to all of the most important search engines and directories for optimum findability.