From Brief to Launch: How Tangison Runs a Project

Every studio claims a process. This one is ours, written the way we run it — including the parts clients experience as friction, because those parts are load-bearing. It has five phases and five gates, and nothing skips a gate.

Phase 1 — Listen (the brief)

A project starts with a conversation, not a form: what you are building, for whom, and what should be different six months after launch. We ask for the uncomfortable version — the budget range even if it is wide, the deadline even if it is political, the organizational politics that will decide whether the site is maintained after we leave.

What we ask of you: honesty about constraints. What you get: a written brief back, confirming what we heard, before anything is designed. If we are the wrong studio for the job — wrong size, wrong sector, wrong timeline — we say it here. It is the cheapest thing either of us will ever save.

Phase 2 — Define (scope and price)

The brief becomes a scope: pages, structure, what copy is included, which integrations, what launch means. The scope becomes a price and a calendar with real dates, and the whole document fits on a page you can actually read — the discipline behind what a website costs and how long it takes.

Gate: you approve the scope. Nothing visual exists yet, and that is deliberate — changes here cost paragraphs; changes in phase three cost screens.

Phase 3 — Design (the system)

We design the system before the pages: type scale, spacing, components, the identity decisions that every page inherits. Then the key screens — home, a service page, the enquiry path — in mobile-first order.

Copy is written with the design, not after it, because words determine layouts more than layouts determine words. You review in two structured rounds: one for direction, one for refinement. Feedback that arrives batched keeps the calendar; feedback that trickles stretches it — the variable we flag honestly from the start.

Gate: you approve the key screens and the words on them.

Phase 4 — Build

The approved system becomes a real site: every page built from the components, performance and accessibility carried by the architecture rather than bolted on, forms tested with real submissions, redirects mapped for every retired URL — the checklist items live here because each one once cost someone a launch.

You see the staging site and walk it on your own phone before anyone talks about going live. The surprises should be pleasant ones by this point.

Gate: you approve the staging build.

Phase 5 — Launch (and the honest ending)

DNS moves in a quiet window, launch checks run down the list, and the first week is watched daily: search console, form delivery, real-connection performance. Then the handover: domain, hosting, files, and the documentation that lets your next developer work without archaeology — ownership in your name, as it should be.

We offer maintenance — what it covers is written down — and decline projects where the honest answer is that you do not need it.

Why the gates exist

The gates are where the project stays yours. At every one, you have seen exactly what exists, what it costs, and what happens next; nothing is discovered at the end that was not chosen at the beginning. The cases you can browse are what this sequence produces when it is honored.

If your current site never had this — if it was discovered rather than chosen — the free audit is the phase-one conversation for the rebuild.