
01 Discovery
Before starting work on a website project, the Aptitude 8 team will first hold discovery sessions with the client to determine goals & objectives, set the brand & visual languages, set the voice & tone, and select the CMS that makes the most sense. We also use this phase to gather all assets like iconography, imagery, copy, links, etc. All of the steps in this phase, inform the following phases of planning and content mapping.
02 Planning & Strategy
The most important part of the planning and strategy phase is mapping out the user journeys. Once a visitor lands on the site, identify the ideal journey and then map it out, step by step. Start with building out a sitemap of pages, then the navigation, menus, and footers. Each journey will contain conversion opportunities that need to be plotted on your user journey map.


03 Content Mapping
Before any of the design and development can begin, the content for each page needs to be created. We help ensure you write in a way that answers the questions of your target audience. Aptitude 8 will leverage the way the content is written and laid out to inform the design and functionality. Pillar pages, topic clusters, and overall user journeys also inform the design and development.
04 Design
The design phase begins with the home page alone. We do this because it is the most important page of a website and because the look and feel of it will inform the design of the rest of the pages. Once the home page is approved, the rest of the pages are designed in a batch to match the Homepage and minimize revisions.


05 Feedback & Approvals
We use Figma as our web design tool and leverage their robust comments tool to capture all client feedback right at the exact part of the design where it’s needed to make it easy for you and your team.
06 Development
Because we follow such a rigid process for the front end of a website engagement, the development of the site tends to be one of the fastest parts of the entire process. We build your CMS with the end user and content editor in mind, ensuring you won't need a developer to make future changes and can iterate without us once we go live.


07 Quality Assurance
In the quality assurance phase, we take extreme measures to ensure that the site’s functionality, responsiveness, readability, accessibility, and overall look and feel are all working as expected. We do 2 rounds of QA internally - once by our developers, and again by our consulting team. Once we've QA'd on our side, we hand it off to your team for final checks.
08 Launch and Training
This step is the most important and most technical because it involves other tools and likely, other teams. The most important parts are ensuring that the DNS (domain host) is setup to point to new content and that the new content is being hosted on the CMS. We set up any integrations to your site that were previously connected and apply site tags, analytics tags, ad pixels, event pixels, meta tags, etc. We train your team on how to use the CMS and hand the site off to you, or provide ongoing maintenance and build towards a phase 2.
