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Pixel Forge

Process

Five stages.No surprises.

Every engagement follows the same shape, whether it is a Shopify theme or a custom application. Each stage ends with something written down that you can hold us to. We find that keeps everyone honest, us included.
PiP moving pixels through five stages, left to right.
PiP moving pixels through five stages, left to right.

  1. Stage 01

    Discover

    Tell us what's broken.

    Or what needs building. Rough notes are welcome. So are suspiciously long WhatsApp messages. We read your analytics, talk to the people who run the thing day to day, and write down what success looks like in plain terms.

    Activities

    • Stakeholder conversations
    • Audit of the current site or store
    • Audience and journey mapping
    • Technical constraints and integrations
    • Scope, budget and timeline agreement

    Output

    A written brief we both sign off on.

  2. Stage 02

    Design

    Give the idea some coordinates.

    Structure, flows, hierarchy and visuals, before anybody gets emotionally attached to the wrong button. The visual layer is built on a token system so it survives contact with real content and future pages.

    Activities

    • Information architecture
    • Wireframes and content hierarchy
    • Design tokens and type system
    • High-fidelity screens for key journeys
    • Prototype of critical interactions

    Output

    A design system and approved screens, not just pretty pictures.

  3. Stage 03

    Engineer

    Make the pixels behave.

    Responsive development and the less glamorous engineering that makes the glamorous part work: componentised frontends, accessible markup, a performance budget from day one, and code someone else could maintain.

    Activities

    • Component and section build
    • CMS or storefront data modelling
    • Integrations and APIs
    • Accessibility and keyboard testing
    • Performance profiling on real devices

    Output

    A working product in a staging environment, reviewed together.

  4. Stage 04

    Refine

    Poke everything.

    Desktop. Mobile. Forms. Edge cases. Things users were definitely not expected to click three times. We test across the devices your audience really uses and fix what the numbers tell us to fix.

    Activities

    • Cross-device QA from 320px up
    • Content and copy fit
    • Analytics and event tracking
    • Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals pass
    • Launch checklist

    Output

    A release candidate with a checklist, not a hope.

  5. Stage 05

    Launch

    Release the pixels.

    Then watch, learn and improve when the real world inevitably finds something creative to do with them. We handle deployment, redirects and monitoring, and stay on to iterate once real traffic arrives.

    Activities

    • Deployment and DNS
    • Redirect and SEO continuity
    • Monitoring and error tracking
    • Handover documentation
    • Optional ongoing iteration

    Output

    A live product and a plan for what comes next.

Working together

What it is like week to week.

You get a single point of contact who is also doing the work, a shared board with what is in progress, and a short written update every week. Decisions are recorded so nobody has to remember a call.

Staging environments are available from the first build, so you see the real thing early rather than a presentation of it. Feedback goes straight into the board.

After launch, we either hand over fully with documentation or continue on a monthly improvement arrangement. Both are fine. The code is yours either way.

Ready for stage one? Let’s forge it.

Discovery starts with a conversation. Tell us what you are trying to do.

Start a project