Planet Online is committed to supplying quality services at competitive prices. In order for us to be able to fulfill this commitment, we try to engage every project with a high degree of professionalism. This entails a number of procedures which enhance our ability to satisfy the needs of our customers.

This page presents an outline of our development process.

	Phase 1 begins with the preliminary brief, which can be entered directly via the questionnaire which you will find on our home page.   We respond by supplying a preliminary timeline which maps out the various stages in the development process and the dates of particular milestones according to our current schedule.   The next step is that of developing a detailed brief for your project, taking into account all of your requirements, anticipated graphic design, programming and layout.
Phase 1 is complete when we have finalised your brief and timeline. At this point we will present our quote for the completed project.   For a small project, phase 1 can be completed by filling out our online creative brief.   For more substantial projects we will usually need to meet with you on several occasions to work through the design. In this case we may develop draft designs for your approval.
	Normally we will have all the information we need to complete the project before we commence phase 2. This becomes more critical with larger projects, however even with small projects we find it is of great value to have all key design issues resolved before production begins.    The length of this phase depends on the size of the project.   You may decide that you will take care of some aspects of the production to save cost. Thus creation and layout of content may be conducted by you or your assigned personnel.
In the real world of course design changes are often requested after the production phase has already begun. We will do our best to accomodate all your requests, however if the changes require significant un-anticipated development time we may need to adjust the price accordingly.   The flexibility of Planet Online's editing system gives you the ability to make many changes to the content of your website without impacting on core design features, and we aim to design your pages in such a way that you can make changes to the text and images easily.
	Phase 3 is the optimisation phase. In reality optimisation and refinement is an ongoing process once you have launched your website. This can produce significant results but requires an equally significant input of time and effort. We will make sure your website is listed in major search engines and that your website ranks well for specific search terms specified in your brief.   Optimisation involves the continuing development of your content, the submission of your website to web search engines, and monitoring of the website usage statistics to see which pages are being visited the most and which search terms your customers are using to find your website.
There are many things you can do to improve the ranking of your website over time, including: Convincing other highly ranked websites to link to your site. Modifying your content to take advantage of stories in mainsteam media which may be relevant to your business. Refining your keywords to reflect the most popular search engine usage. You may also wish to attend one of our seminars to improve your understanding of search engine technologies.