Calgary Web Designer Jenn Armour | Info Architecture + User Centric Web Design + Online Marketing + Social Media + Ideas

Successful web site re-designs

Successful web site’s will meet client’s business objectives – bottom line. In order to satisfy a particular set of business needs these needs must be brought forth by the major stake holder’s involved in the project. Often an insightful questions is “what do you expect your web site to do for your company”?

Discovery Phase I – AKA needs analysis

The discovery phase of a web site re-design will involve a critical analysis of current web site and online market position. Using various tools and metric’s i will provide a detailed sketch of your online business as it exists in the web sphere. An evaluation of your current positioning is needed in order to develop a roadmap of where your company would like to go and what specific changes are required.

Discovery Phase II

Initial consultation will serve to explore key questions surrounding the re-design. This will firstly include a presentation of the critical analysis. One of my main objectives is to help facilitate strategic discussion about your company’s needs, uncover your online vision, goals, and expectations. There is no talk at this stage regarding how to accomplish these goals. It is more about this question “if your new site re-design were a success what would that look like”?

Resulting from the initial meetings and consultation will emerge the following building blocks to building a successful online business.

• current web site’s state, strengths, limitations, deficiencies
• current competitors
• web site mission statement development
• perception and brand
• primary and secondary business objectives
• primary and secondary audience

Documentation and Proposed Methods

Once the discovery ground work has been laid I will provide a suggested framework and strategy to support your business objectives. In other words – matching business objectives with proposed design and technical methods. It is important to note here that spending quality time in this phase of the development will save your company time and money in the long run. In fact it will save you from having to continually pay for re-design’s. Costs and time frames are proposed in this phase.

Strategic Production Phase I

This phase is all about content. More definitively information architecture. If you have worked with design agencies already you will most likely be familiar with some of the earlier processes. When dealing with content what you are probably used to is being asked to provide the design firm with content, navigation structures and high level site maps. However, it is my experience that this is where projects get way off course. Either content is thrown together last minute or your company is asked to do the general content design. This approach can be likened to paying a professional recipe builder to develop the steps and methods involved in creating a recipe and then requiring you to provide the ingredients.

User-centered design is focused on the user’s needs, wants, goals and expectations. For a web site to be a success there must be an understanding of your intended audience. It is very common to think that you are your audience. Much research has been done on this topic.

The goal in this phase of the project is to develop, using several tools, a portrait of the different user groups and how best to satisfy their goals and expectations. Doing this effectively is the difference between a top notch successful web site and an average site. Information architecture development is one of the least understood and applied processes in web development.

Deliverables depending on budget can include content audits, task analysis, mental model’s, high level navigation structures, deep navigation structures, interactive maps, personae, and wireframes.

Production Phase II

You are probably wondering why there hasn’t been any mention of the site re-design’s look and feel element? The reason for this is that client’s will have a tendency to get very hung up on new designs and lose focus of the goals and business objectives for the project. Secondly, it is next to impossible to design an appropriate interface without having a very clear understanding of the intended audiences. This phase of the development is actually the shortest in terms of time. The deliverable is a set of mock-ups and designs that are aligned with earlier objectives.

Production Phase III

This is where the actual technical build of the project happens.

Request for Web Site Re-Design