For designing and development of web assets we adopt the following practice:
Strategy and Story Board Discussions : Story/Drawing Board Discussions is a part of the Initial Scoping Milestone, wherein we initiate project discussions and create a requirement specifications document based on answers to our initial questionnaire which will help us in understanding your requirement and deriving a structure for your web site for navigation. Basically this exercise yields what technologies to be used in developing the web site? How the web pages will be linked? What keywords should be used for each page? (this helps us rank high in Google, Yahoo and MSN). So, drawing board phase lasts for 3-4 days. This is a one-time effort and most sites fail because they do not do this. We strongly recommend this because without planning, execution is haphazard.
Data Collection : This stage is the content and images which are required during the design and development of the project. There will some content and text which will be available initially before we start and there will some data collection which happens based on the needs during the course of development.
Designing & Development : Based on the discussions, data collected, site map and approved statement of work (SOW) we start the designing and development of the websites / web portals.
For better understandability of our approach, please refer to our methodology