Behind the scenes at KOTA: Web Design process

Introduction.

Welcome! We’re KOTA – a progressive and insightful design agency focused on creating impactful, engaging brands and immersive digital experiences. We combine art, strategy, design and technology to create beautiful and functional web experiences. Our team of digital experts knows that well-designed websites offer much more than just aesthetics and that behind every successful project stands a strong strategy and a clearly defined process.

With more than 10 years of KOTA’s experience and over 100 launched projects, plus even more satisfied clients, we’re confident to say: we know how to do it and to do it well.

 

How we do it the KOTA way.

1. Kick-Off Meeting

An integral cornerstone of our process, this meeting between our and your teamsnormally lasts anywhere from one to three hours and allows us to get from you all the information we need to start off our process. In 2020 we shifted to remote working which means our kick-offs currently take place online, but our team is always happy to visit you in your office.

 

2. Digital Strategy & Discovery

Identifying what information is important to your end-users and developing a good digital strategy are the basis for all our projects. In order to achieve that, our discovery phase allows us to kick off the project with the right understanding and clear definition of what exactly needs to be achieved, as well as properly scope and plan all deliverables.

 

3. User Experience (UX)

Having a clear and concise structure of your future website is essential.  We need to ensure the user experience is engaging and creative but also intuitive. During this phase of our process, we will work with you on structuring your content and putting any usability guidelines set by you in place.

We will wireframe the website using text and image blocks as well as call to actions to create a prototype you can click through to give you an idea of all the user journeys. Once you are ready to sign off the wireframes, we will move on to the fun part – creative design!

 

4. Bespoke Web Design (UI)

For every page agreed during discovery, we will design bespoke templates and deliver them to you in the form of an interactive prototype giving you a real idea of how the website will look and behave.

All our designs are carefully created to match your brand and make you stand out from the competition while providing your users with an engaging and refreshing experience.

 

5. Web Development

Once the design for all the page templates has been signed off, we are ready to kick off the development stage of the project. Here our dev team will dive into the code to translate the beautiful designs into a fully responsive built, using the appropriate technology for the site. The final product will be presented to you in the form of a beta link as well as access to the CMS will be provided.

We pride ourselves on building lightweight websites that feature a high level of finesse through subtle animations, keeping the user wanting to stay on the site longer, but without compromising on functionality and intuition.

 

6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Analytics

All our websites are designed in a way to achieve high search engine rankings. The CMS provides friendly URLs, editable metadata and title tags which are used as the first step in achieving a high search engine ranking. This is the technical SEO we set up for your site, which optimises your website for the crawling and indexing phase helping search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.

We are huge fans of data at KOTA. For every website we launch, we make sure to set up Google Analytics to track and measure website performance and user behaviour. Our SiteCare clients also receive a personalised dashboard with all the relevant web stats.

 

7. Final Sign Off & Go Live

Once all stakeholders are happy with the site and the final QA has been performed, the big day is here – you provide the final sign off and we migrate the brand new site to your domain. You can now brag about it on social media and give a few kind words to our hard-working team!

 

Moving forwards.

After the site has launched, we have a guarantee period of 30 days within which we will iron out any little bugs that may have appeared once live. Moving forward, we also offer ongoing support we can provide you with. Our monthly SiteCare packages include advanced hosting and daily backups, allocated development hours for small fixes and updates as well as marketing support with a dedicated analytics dashboard.