What services do you wish to accomplish by having a Web site developed?
- What, do you wish to accomplish by having a Web site developed?
- Does your company Web site accomplish anything now? If so, what?
- What is your customer demographics?
- What is your time frame?
- What is the primary message you wish to convey through the web site?
- What business functions (if any) do you want the Web site to fulfill? (i.e. provide customer service, order products, etc.)
For most companies a website is the point of first touch for customers and suppliers. The visitors’ impression of the site sets the tone for establishing the whole relationship. We understand the importance of this initial contact and pride ourselves on creating the right first impression.
The Muscovy difference is in the approach. We are not in the business of mass producing template websites but rather bringing our customers a tailored site to their market and culture. The Muscovy team consists of world class web designers, cushioned on top of a broad team of business support personnel. Our customers do not have the time nor the desire to manage the website build process; with our identity expertise, e-commerce know-how, branding and marketing experience, we offer our customers a large corporation’s web presence support team with the proven project management Muscovy customers grown to rely upon.
Web Site Development Process
After years of developing web sites and web-based applications, our developers and project managers have honed the process for determining your needs, scooping your project, and developing to your standards.
Building a website is like building a house. The process happens in sequential steps. For instance, when building a house it is important to put the roof on before installing the carpet! Likewise, in building a website there are sequential steps that happen in order to keep the cost down and the work progressing. This document outlines the steps and what you can expect from the Muscovy staff when building your site. Let’s step through the process of building your website so you know what to expect through the process.
Step 1 - The Mockups
The first step is to make a picture of the site (a blueprint). This gives you the opportunity to see what the site will look like, where buttons and other controls lay on the page and make sure the design represents your vision for your website. The mock-ups are not functional however, so the links will not work etc. When building a house, if the contractor needs to move a wall, it is much easier to make the change before the wall is full of electrical wires, plumbing, covered with drywall and painted (it is cheaper for the customer too!). We make a picture of the page before we add the functionality for the same reason, less rework is needed to make changes keeping the cost down. When the mock-up of the main page is complete you will be asked to review the look and feel. When you are satisfied with the main page we will produce a mock-up of a ‘template’ of the sub-page. When you are satisfied with both, we will go on to the next step.
Step 2 - Navigation and 'flow'
The next step is to use our template of the sub-page to make all the sub-pages. This step gives you the opportunity to emulate your customers/clients experience and navigate around the site. This step is important so we can consider the users and make sure the critical features they will want to access are readily accessible, that the workflow progression is intuitive and the overall experience is satisfactory. The buttons and form submittals may not work during this step however, the site will not process transactions.
Step 3 - Content
In this step we will insert the verbiage and documentation related to the site. From the welcome screen greeting to the contact us paragraph there is a lot of wording that goes into a website. This step has the heaviest demand on you to have all the wording written and proofread. You will have a lot of notice of the deadlines but be ready, we will come asking for content!
During this step we also build the ‘text treatments’. Text treatments are the fonts, sizes, colors etc for the titles, sub-paragraph headers and main body text for the site. When we do the walk-through for Step 3 you will be able to adjust the way the words look on the page, centering headers or changing fonts ensuring that the verbiage on the site is just right.
Step 4 - Programming Functions
In this step we add in the back-end programming that makes the site ‘work’. The shopping carts will ‘turn on’, the auto-responder emails will ‘go live’ and start sending, this step is the final review before launch. The walk-through for this step is a review of each function on each page to make sure everything works as expected.