My latest project to go live was the Emcon Industrial Services Ltd – www.emconservices.co.uk.
This website project came from a recommendation, I was asked to produce a website for the company using their colour scheme, logos and branding.
Emcon are an industrial machinery movers and factory relocation specialists. They have been trading since 2001 and have many years of experience in machinery relocations.
Stage 1: Research
The is one of the most important phases in the web design process, this is where I researched the type of work the company did and began collecting ideas for both the design and possible SEO of this project at a later stage. Collecting Keywords to be included throughout the important areas of code for SEO (read my top 10 tips for SEO here).
Stage 2: Photoshop Design
This is where the design starts to come together. Beginning with a few sketches of designs following on from my research and client meeting. These sketches then get converted into a PSD in photoshop, using the logos and colours provided.
Imagery is usually a problem when designing websites, good images from the client are hard to come by, Emcon were different, they had plenty of images they have taken for “case studies”. These combined with the PDF’s of their brochures proved very useful and helped the design process.
Stage 3: Coding
Once the design had been finished and signed off in Photoshop, it was time to get down with the coding! (my favourite phase). Nothing too fancy here just your traditional XHTML / CSS coding. I always give my XHTML pages the .php file extension, this is because I use alot of .php includes and variables making the coding more efficient and faster. Its far easier to re-use parts of code by using php Includes. I think it makes you a better coder too. (another little tip for beginners learning to become website designers / coders).
This design makes use of the “Lightbox Gallery” which I find is a great way of displaying your image galleries on your web design projects. If you don’t know what I mean by the Lightbox gallery have a look at how I have used it on Emcon’s case study pages - http://www.emconservices.co.uk/case-study1.php.
Stage 4: Putting It Live
Now the site is coded, its time to put it live! Browser testing is key here, make sure it works on all the major browser platforms. Following the client approving the site, I quickly uploaded it to my server and began the testing.
The turn around of this site was very fast, it took a total of 20 hours from initial client meeting through to putting it Live. This was helped by the client being so well prepared!!
Check out the finished site here – http://www.emconservices.co.uk/
Thanks for reading, make sure you check back for more about my recent works, if you have any suggestions or comment please feel free below.
Andy.