The Perfect WordPress Development Process

At The DMA we understand it’s not just about a website, it’s actually about your business. That’s why we get to know you and your broader business objectives first. We then underpin this with our solid and proven project management methodology, developed from our experience on hundreds of WordPress builds.

Each project that we engage in will have a solid scope of works. Talk to many web developers about their pet grievances and quickly they will say the words “scope creep”. The key reason why this happens is that the project has begun without sufficiently outlining what is considered to be included in the project and what is not.

A good scope of work is good for both client and developer. We run our projects with very clearly set out stages with each finishing by our client signing off on the work. Below is set out this staged process that we follow.

Before a line of code is written or opening Photoshop to do graphics we go to the trouble of drawing all of the major interfaces in the website. These wireframes also go into detail on how each piece of functionally is going to be implemented. So as well as a tool to demonstrate to our client what we’re going to build, it’s a blueprint for our developers when the time comes to actually building it.These wireframes are presented to the our client, explained in detail and often updated to take into account any feedback until they are then approved and signed off.

Now it’s time to put a coat of paint on the project. There’s a little bit of secret sauce that goes into this but ultimately we create a set of graphic mockups that again show each of the main interfaces in the website. We have a special tool in the client portal section of our website where we show these mockups to our clients. It’s simple in how it works but the trick is that it shows the mockups in a way that they look very much like a real website. You can scroll up and down and you see things as close to the actual size as possible.Once again there’s a round of feedback to collect and changes to the mockups. Generally there are always some tweaks but that ok. That’s the point. Changes at this stage are easy. Work things around until everyone is happy with the way that things look.

Then the graphic mockups are signed off as approved.

Next up is (sometimes) the most difficult part of a project. Collecting the content (think images, graphics and text) that actually makes up the website.In our case we have a team of copywriters that are available to our clients, so we can and do often write the content for a website. The other alternative is that our client supplies the content.

In either case, we need to collect it and collect it all so the build can go quickly in one movement.