To ensure their website visitor get the user experience that was intended, our website project planning philosophy is based on Jesse James Garrett's book The Elements of the User Experience. This planning phase ensures that we establish an excellent user experience, and we anticipate many potential problems and issues in advance.

Garrett starts with the five planes of the user experience. The first four planes pertain to the planning phase, while the fifth plane pertains to the design phase.

This element encompasses the strategic objectives of the site, including what the owner of the website wants to get out of the experience, and what the visitor wants to get out of it. For example, you may wish to let people know you are selling widgets, and a potential widget buyer may wish to learn about why your widgets are the best ones. We will identify organizational goals and understand how the website will support your organizational goals.

This element defines the features and functionality of the website and how they interact. Here we think about what kinds of extensions might be included on your website. We think of types of extensions first (for example, a calendar extension that shows events by category), and then we identify specific Joomla extensions to incorporate into the site.

We also get very specific about deliverables for the site, including whether custom programming will be required for the optimum user experience.

The scope of the project is given structure through interaction design (how the system behaves) and information architecture (the arrangement of the content items, including navigation structure). Here, we'll work with you to develop a site map. If custom programming is required, we'll also work through the architecture of the extension here.

The skeleton is the arrangement on the information on the page, such as navigation, content, photos, buttons, and so forth. It is important that information is presented in such a way that facilitates understanding, promotes the most important elements of the page, and minimizes other minor elements.

The surface is the visual design. It is the last layer to be developed because it must incorporate the other four planes so the website will be effective. This is the design phase of the process. Most people come into the website process already having some set ideas about this phase and find it hard to not start here.

When the surface phase is completed, we move to the development phase. Here we convert the graphic design from the surface phase to a programmed interface that will work with Joomla. We program and configure Joomla to include all required photos, buttons, and other functionality. We will also enter your content for the website which you provide, and we can show you how to do this yourself using best practices to maintain usability and accessibility for your site. We will develop your site on your server or on our own server, and you will have full access to look at the site at any time to provide feedback or ask questions.

In our testing and training phase, we check carefully to make sure all promised functionality is delivered in the site, and we provide a hands-on training session for you to learn how to care for your new Joomla website. We will train your IT staff how to keep the site up-to-date with the latest version of Joomla as well.

Once these phases are complete, we will launch the site in the deployment phase.

Going forward, site maintenance will be important. This can either be managed by your IT staff alone, or we can join them in keeping the site running. If you need information about maintenance, we would be happy to provide a proposal for that separately.