Our Process

Every company has their own methods for doing whatever it is they do. Some firms follow the ‘standard’ or currently accepted way of going about their day to day work, whilst others go against the grain and have a completely separate mindset. Neither is wrong and it’s certainly true that both methodologies have their pros and cons. We here at Friendly Design kind of sit in the middle between these two styles – we like the framework that has been built by several well-respected companies and individuals over the years, but we also like to regard ourselves as a company who do things a little differently.

Many of the aforementioned structure-builders have recently been speaking about the way they go about building websites from start to finish – they’ve given us all an incredibly useful insight into their process. The idea for this post is based on that same idea of getting ‘how we do things’ out into the open, but as is the way with Friendly Design, we’ve gone about it a little differently.

First off, this is part one of a series of posts which is going to cover every aspect of our design process – from the initial thumbs up from the client, right through to the signing of the project closure document. The only difference here is that the ‘client’ in this case is actually ourselves, as we’ll be letting you shadow us as we plan, design and implement the latest addition to the Friendly portfolio of products – FriendlyGP.

So, without further ado, here’s what we’ll be going through over the next few posts:

• Initial ideas and our ‘scrapbook’
• Competitor analysis
• Site map and structure
• Initial wireframes (B&W)
• Colour boards
• The final wireframing process
• Ideas boards
• ‘go crazy’ day
• Shortlisted designs
• Final design
• Complete change of mind (just kidding)
• Typography
• Implementing the CMS (kind of ‘specialist’ for this project)
• Pulling it all together
• Training materials
• Final touches (not as ‘minor’ as you probably think)
• Launch

Phew! And that’s just the list of things we’ll be going through. Rest assured, we’ll try and make it as interesting as possible – we’re considering doing some screencasts and time-lapse bits and bobs to add a bit of sparkle to it all. By doing this, we’re hoping to give the ‘community’ a look into what we do, how we do it, why we do it and also to use it as a training tool when we take on some new members of staff (more on that in another post).