“This leads to the development of the site’s
structure and wireframes to create a seamless
experience for the end user. A digital designer then
shares web trends for the client’s sector and the
current design landscape and gathers feedback from
the client on their visual likes and dislikes, before
bringing the project to life and creating the overall
look and feel of the product.
“Once the client’s happy with the designs, we
move to the most time-consuming phase, which is
frontend and backend development of a responsive,
templated website – usually in our preferred CMS,
Drupal 8. For our more agile projects, we’ll go through
a series of sprints, involving a cycle of prototyping,
development, testing and refinement. Depending on
the client, this might also include integration with
other systems, including CRM, payment systems, etc.
“Our project manager keeps the client informed at
every stage and makes sure everything is on track in
the studio. We have daily standup meetings to ensure
that everyone knows what’s expected of them, and
regular client progress updates.
“With the development complete, we train the
client team in the new CMS and hand the site over for
acceptance testing, and to add content. We resolve
any issues in a secured testing environment before
deploying the site using Pantheon’s cloud-based
hosting platform. Then we have a final snagging
period to address any niggles. A project typically lastsfrom three to six months, but this can vary a lot based
on both the functional requirements for the site and
the level of user research and testing involved.”D
rupal 8 is IE’s CMS of choice. Ed
explained what other applications
and services are in their toolkit:
“On the design side, we use tools
that help make sharing and
collaboration between our clients,
consultants, developers and designers as
comfortable as possible. We mainly use Sketch for
our website and web app designs, and share
internally and externally using InVision – which our
clients love. There’s still a place for Adobe Photoshop
though, and of course, our brand team makes heavy
use of the Adobe Suite of software.
“HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the fundamental
building blocks for websites, so unless there is a
paradigm shift with internet browsers, these will
continue to be the underlying technologies for a long
time to come. Users expect faster loading, instantly
accessible websites, so ‘lean’ websites are becoming
more commonplace, with initiatives like Accelerated
Mobile Pages.
“Things like jQuery is being phased out in favour
of ‘vanilla JavaScript,’ and frontend JavaScript
frameworks like VueJS, React and Angular. These
JavaScript frameworks are all currently working toUNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF
OSTEOPATHY
(ANDUNIVERSITYCOLLEGE
OFOSTEOPATHYCLINIC)
uco.ac.ukI
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University College of Osteopathy42 ___________________________________________________profileDesign Values