We work a little differently here at Waterstreet.
We don’t do milestones and deliverables and all those of other big, meaningless words. We work with you to develop your site. Not for you, but with you. It’s important that we’re clear on that part. When we start working on the site, we’ll be working together — with the site’s design, architecture, hosting, tweaking and decision making, you’ll do almost as much work as we do.
To that end, we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page. Here’s some of the main things:
Continuous development
Some companies take a .psd or a mockup and send you a first draft and then a second draft and then give you two weeks or so to get all your revisions in before calling it complete. We don’t work like that. We publish pretty-much continuously to a live (but private) server where you can see things unfold live. You’ll be expected to provide regular feedback on things as we go, rather than on large milestones. This way, no one ends up wasting time working in the wrong direction. If we don’t have something right, you’ll see it right away before we spend two days working on it.
Why do we do it this way? Imagine I have a simple question about something like font weights for headings. Why would I wait for a milestone that’s two weeks away to ask you about your preference? We find continuous development and iteration is the most timely and cost-effective method of working.
Mockups and Wireframes
During development, we won’t be held to exact specifications outlined in wireframes or detailed mockups. We simply can’t be. A web browser is a very different animal than Photoshop. We’ll do our absolute best to work with you to achieve the look and feel you want for your site, but current, modern responsive websites just can’t be governed by Photoshop comps. Informed, yes. Governed, no.
Starting
We expect you to have a pretty good idea of what you want before we get started. If you’ve got old content that you want migrated, get it in good shape. Think about your new site’s purpose and your goals for it. When you’ve got all that well thought out, we’re in a great place to get started. Fuzzy ideas and messy content is a very poor, very expensive place to start. We’ll help guide you and make good decisions, but things need to be in order before we start work.
Money Matters
This part is simple — we simply expect half of the agreed amount up front and the other half after we launch. Please convert all currency to shillings before sending it to us.
Launch and hand-over
After we’re all happy with the site, we’ll teach you how to use it and launch. After that, you’ll get a month to point out bugs and small issues that need fixing. Any major issues discovered at this stage can be negotiated as a new project. After this first month, we charge the agreed hourly rate for any issues that come up. That said, we don’t nickel and dime, and we’re happy to fix tiny issues for free and batch bigger issues together into one invoice over a few months. We like happy clients.
What you can expect from us
We’ll deliver a site to your specifications in a timely and cost-effective manner. We’ll be prompt with all communication and will meet deadlines that we all agree on. We’ll be as helpful and cheery as possible. We want you (and your website) to do well. Again, we like happy clients.
What we expect from you
We expect you to be ready to start working on the site the same day we start. If we agree on a date for start of work, we expect you to have available time then as well. You won’t need to work full-time on the site, obviously, but you’ll need to be available. We expect prompt replies to email and requests for feedback. We also expect that your site will generally be ready to go as well. You should have a good idea of why you want a new site, and if there’s any content to migrate, this should be in good shape. We’ll help with these steps, of course, but we expect you to do this leg-work.
Basically, time is money — your money — and we don’t want to waste a penny of it.