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Manifestation - 7 Steps to a Successful Site
If you are in
business for yourself, an executive with decision making power,
or the head of your company, you are probably bombarded with advice,
opinions and information about how to build or re-vamp your website
and how to use it to your advantage in business.
To be as successful
as possible in your e-business, you’ll need to plan ahead
and you’ll need to properly fuse the disciplines of design,
technology and marketing. From conception to reality, the process
of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary approach.
The more time
and effort you put into planning and building your website, or revamping
an existing one, the more successful you’ll be. Your new site
will have more potential in accomplishing your business goals, your
business will look more credible to all the people visiting your
site, and you’ll increase your bottom line.
The following
is a guide for building a new website. It shows how a corporate
webmaster or Web department creates a world-class website, and it
is the same step by step process that every organization, no matter
how small, should follow.
Step
1 – Discovery:
The first phase involves determining the scope of the project,
the timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations,
and your current human and technical resources.
Step
2 - Concept and Planning:
The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals,
types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due
date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is,
the demographics and psychographics of your visitors.
In this phase
the architecture or organization of the information that will
be included on the site needs to be planned as well. The most
important part of this step is determining your goals for the
site. You need to ask yourself and any other stake holders exactly
what the new site ought to yield when completed. What do you expect
the site to do? What do you want to get out of it? What messages
do you want to convey to all the people who will eventually view
it? What are the priorities of the site in terms of your business
and making money? What types of people will be using the site
and what will they want to accomplish while there?
Step
3 - Design Specifications:
This is when the look & feel and a visual design specification
are created. Here you’ll determine the fonts, colors and
size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount.
You’ll want to write specifications for the images you’ll
be using on the site as well. It’s also the time to decide
upon and design the technical infrastructure and architecture
of the site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine
what programming languages and databases will be used, if any,
and any other technical features your site will need.
One of the
secondary benefits of following Step 3 is that you’ll have
a document to refer back to later on when adding to the site.
If you hire a new Web person of company, you can give them this
design specification document for them to follow whenever they
work on your site
Step
4 – Production:
Before this phase begins, everyone who is involved in this project,
including people who give the final ‘ok’, need to
know that there will be a technical and look and feel design freeze
at this point. If any changes are needed during this point, then
those changes will be done in the next redesign.
The production
phase can be broken down into three areas and will include:
Step
4a - The design production:
The artistic look and feel design production, usability designing,
the navigation production, and image and button creation. The
homepage of the site and the inner page template both need the
new design applied to them. The homepage design may use the same
template the rest of the site uses, or it may be unique. If it
differs from the rest of the site, then make sure its look and
feel is very similar to the look and feel of the inner page template(s).
Also, if it differs, consider applying this entire step-by-step
guide to the homepage as well, treating it as a separate, but
related entity.
Step
4b - The technical production:
This entails the html coding, any other coding to contribute to
the functionality and the configuration of the server’s
environment. The technical aspects could also include any server
side coding in a major programming language, database design and
development, and site security measures.
Step
4c - The marketing production:
This area includes creating the homepage and pre-determined inner
pages to be search engine and index friendly. It also includes
the copy writing for every page. Any mechanisms for interacting
with the visitors will be produced here. For example, forms on
your site that asks users to give information are ways for a user
to interact with your site. Although the look & feel of the
form falls under ‘design’, and the actual mechanisms
that make the form work falls under ‘technology’,
the purpose of the forms will be very marketing-centric. What
you ask, how you store the data, and how you retrieve it and use
it later are all marketing issues that should be addressed in
this step.
Step
5 – Testing:
The produced site now must be loaded onto a staging area that
is exactly like the production environment, or made accessible
to testers only. During this phase, various people will test all
aspects of site, including functionality, spelling and grammar,
hyperlinks, and all other elements. This is often called the Quality
Assurance phase.
Step
6 – Publishing:
This phase is the push of the new site from staging to production.
Here the site is made live and is now on the World Wide Web.
Step
7 - E-marketing and maintenance:
Unless the site is marketed, it won’t matter how well-designed
or technically robust it is, no one will ever visit or use it.
Therefore, the final and ongoing phase entails implementing e-marketing
techniques, keeping the site’s content fresh, and making
continual adjustments based on site specific and customer research.
Whether you
decide to tackle building a new website yourself, or you choose
to hire someone else to do it, the steps outlined above ought to
be followed. If you decide to do it yourself, you’ll need
to read up on graphic design and usability, Web technologies and
e-marketing.
If you hire
an outside company to build a site for you, ask them how they plan
to accomplish it. Ask them if they have a set method for building
a new site or re-vamping an old one. If they have a good system,
it ought to look a lot like the steps above. They ought to be proficient
in all aspects of website development and be able to communicate
to you everything they are doing and why. Remember, the better your
site is initially and the better you manage your new site going
forward, the better your business will be.
Article
by Jason O'Connor
© 2004
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