Our belief is that a website is the underlying platform for your business to deliver your brand essence and cement the user experience. Whether your marketing activity is online, offline or a combination of both, your website is the central hub to facilitate information gathering and online transactions, forming an essential ingredient for your marketing strategy.

The technical team at Longtail has a vast range of knowledge and experience across the spectrum of web platforms. Previous projects have included custom Content Management Systems, Mobile implementations, Integration of 3rd party systems and everything in-between. Our focus is to implement and integrate existing tools or develop a custom solution that best suits the client requirements that will also deliver the finest web experience for their users.

Building a new website for any business is a large commitment (both in $’s, time and resources) which requires the experience of a dedicated and reliable agency to guide you through the plethora of stages within that process.

Longtail’s approach to any major website project five key phases, all requiring dedicated resources and time to ensure that the end product meets your expectations and objectives:

Discovery Phase

This phase specifically explores the business requirements and defines the project scope. It answers three imperative questions:

• Why are we building the website? (outlining the business and / or marketing purpose)
• What will the website do? (exacting the scope and definition)
• Who cares about the website and why? (gathering input from key stakeholders and decision makers)

Aside from defining the essential project criteria, we have found that this delivers two other main benefits – the context in which we need to work as well as providing important information in formulating strategies that are unique to your business.

Concept Phase

Following the Concept phase we have we have a balanced view of what is required from both points of view – the business and the audience.

We use the information gathered to start to formulate our over arching strategy in addressing the key elements of the site:

• Our story and how best to structure the words for navigation and page layout
• Visual style and how best to present the site
• Functionality and interactivity – how best to tackle the coding and other technological needs for the site

Structure & Design Phase

With the website strategy in place, the next level of detail needs to be developed as a specific blueprint for build. This is specifically covers development of:

• A matrix detailing each piece of content and the best presentation format
• The site map detailing the main structure
• Main section designs
• Technical architecture

This phase will also result in a detailed user acceptance and launch plans based on the structure and design outputs.

Build Phase

The build phase sees the output of the site itself.

• All graphic assets are created
• Coding and programming is completed
• Content is populated

QA Phase

Allowing thorough testing and review time is essential prior to the launch of a site. During this final phase we will be on hand to address any issues uncovered during testing. Once testing is complete and all issues resolved, the site is formally signed off and launched!