We place great importance on not just creating high quality, beautiful and intelligent solutions but also on the process of delivering them.
A refined and effective software development process helps us to produce an end result that meets or exceeds your expectations, but we want more than that. As much of our work comes from repeat business and referrals, we want to make sure that every interaction with Versantus from initial sales meeting to project kick-off, delivery, and beyond is a positive one.
We want to deliver the outstanding results you expect with clarity, on-time and in budget.
Our agile process
We use a development process called Agile, which is designed to deliver high-quality products that meet your customers' needs in a reliable, collaborative way, and cost-effective way. Collaboration, change, and experimentation are at the heart of this process.
Typically we split a project into 2-week stages called sprints. Throughout each sprint you'll have regular communication with your dedicated project manager, then an end-of-sprint demo where we show you our progress and agree what's next.
It’s not uncommon for requirements to shift during a project, as a result of new information, ideas, or even business changes. Breaking a project into sprints like this means that we can respond more effectively to your feedback, making incremental improvements whilst they are still cheap to make, and ensuring we deliver the result that you need, not necessarily what you thought you needed at the start.
From start to finish (and beyond!)
Discovery phase
Each project we undertake starts with the crucial discovery phase. This involves assessing the current situation, reviewing your goals and objectives and formulating the plan to achieve them.
Audience(s)
We review, research and confirm the user types (personas) that will visit your site, and take time to understand their situation and needs so that we can plan direct routes to important information for them.
Content and SEO
We will review any existing content and information architecture (how your pages are organised). Whether you're starting from scratch, or already have a large and complex website, we can help you to re-organise, clarify and optimise your website for your audiences and for search engines.
Technology
We assess the website technology choices, modules/plugins and any back-office integrations you might need. We'll also want to understand business processes and team structure so that we can deliver tools and interfaces that work well for you.
We'll make clear recommendations, confirming the scope and required budgets, as well as considering the future roadmap.
Design phase
Now we start to breathe life into your project. Our specialist UX designers work closely with you to understand your brand, messaging and audience personas, and to deliver the best possible user experience.
Wireframing and prototyping
We start to think about how the pages are put together, ensure the information is clear and there are adequate calls to action. We link the pages together using Invision, where they can be easily seen and commented on by the whole team.
Visual design
Once the wireframes are approved we move onto creating full visuals of the key website pages for review and feedback. These then inform the rest of the design decisions throughout the site.
We will help you to use your data to create a rich, easy to navigate visual environment in which to present your data, engage users, and clarify how organisations and individuals can use your services to best effect.
The site will be designed to be fully responsive and tablet/mobile friendly, meaning that it will work beautifully across all devices and screen sizes.
Development phase
Our development team will now turn these visuals into a working website. We develop websites using leading applications such as Wordpress, Drupal, MySQL, PHP and Java because the tech is proven and works well. We know how to get the best out of these platforms to take your business confidently into the future.
They will complete:
- Backend and front end development
- Build necessary integrations
- Complete data migration
- Cross-browser and mobile testing
- Performance and security testing
We provide full training to your team as part of handing over for user acceptance testing. We take on board and implement your feedback from this process before launching the site.
All work is completed in a staging environment separate from your live website.
Core values
This process is of course underpinned by our core company values:
- Mind-blowing quality - exceed your expectations
- Learning and sharing - so we can support our customers
- Collaboration - we're better together
- Being good - ethical, happy, and from the heart
Once we’ve launched your website we provide service packs so that we’re always on hand to provide user support and future development. We also provide optional enterprise-grade hosting and security updates making sure that your website is available and secure.
To discuss your next project get in touch with our team for a no-obligation chat.