Our Process

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is where everything starts.

To serve you best, your website partner should be fluent in the language of business. Growth, share, revenue, return on investment, projections, budgets, timeliness, and key performance indicators are central to virtually every web project. Do you want to grow traffic? By how much? How soon? At what investment level?

We become experts in you, in your world, your market, your audience. What are your users like? What do they like? Who are they? What do they do? What kinds of things do they respond favorably to? What are your resources? How much staff time can you spend on day-to-day operations of the site?

What legacy content do you have? If we're migrating you from an existing application, we evaluate its data to assess general feasibility and identify areas of uncertainty.

Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable.

–Dwight D. Eisenhower

What action do you want your site visitors to take? Do you want people to sign up? Do you want them to buy a product or service? Donate to a cause? Attend a class? Share experiences? What level of infrastructure will that require?

How will success be measured? (What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?) By traffic? Growth? Revenue? Registered users? Search engine ranking? Ads volume? If, for every dollar invested in a new site, the site yields two dollars in additional revenue, is the budget a constraint or an opportunity?

Websites are a means, not an end. What job should your web application do for your users? How can your website provide a great experience to your visitors?

Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

–Ferdinand A. Porsche, NY Times

The most beautiful designs aren't just pretty: they provide an optimal user experience. They invite the user to explore. They make it all easy. Navigation and design must seem to flow together naturally, even when it's complicated ... especially when it's complicated.

Through User Stories, we outline the intended user experiences that define the functionality of the site, that define what we build.

But that's not all there is to design. What does the site feel like? What smells do the colors have? What texture does the typography bring?

While flat Photoshop mock-ups can provide a general sense of how a completed web application will look and feel, it can be at best only an analogue of the final. This is why our preference is to transition to prototyping the design in actual code for the final process.

Measure twice, cut once: Planning the right code foundation is essential for effective development.

This is where we bring the UX alive in the code. We map out the Technical Architecture — Drupal, migrations, custom software development, integrations with third-party systems.

This is when the project begins to looks and function as a living application for the first time. The last sprint is the shakedown cruise where you and your team go through the project with us, identify issues, note any changes to make prior to launch.

And now, as the site begins its life "in the wild," we monitor what's happening, see how it's received by the audience, how it performs under real-world conditions, how people are reacting to the experience presented. A project is not ready until each feature has been tested and the end-user experience has been validated.

Over time, we evaluate with you how the project meets the KPIs. Is traffic meeting expectations. Are people responding to the features as hoped? What are people wanting? What's next?

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.

–Albert Einstein

The most successful projects don't treat this process as a one-off experience, but rather an iterative process always working to improve the user experience, better meet the site's goals.

Second, third, fourth iterations are almost always much easier and less intense than the first, but these are the iterations where some of the biggest wins can happen. When the users see a site continually improving, they tend to welcome the process and more readily embrace change.

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.

–Buddhist proverb

Release early! Release often!