Post tip1 and pre tip2
Right, you gave me all that twaddle about post-it notes. Point taken Mr Owner, Director, Marketing manager, IT dude who has just inherited this web thing. But incidentally my competitors are right now shelling out fortunes on their new websites. Ahem…I hear Jones and Jones diggers are spending nothing short of 50K on their new one! All I know is I want a new website, and it simply has to be the best in the industry.
Well, all of the above have actually been said to me, apart from the word twaddle. Ha, I bet this is yet to figure even in the Enriched Teen’s Vocabulary Edition!
Coming to Scissors, paper, pens and post-its… I know they don’t exactly sound like the newest in technology, and doesn’t really come across as the best piece of professional advice in the age of Twitter and the iPad.
But, surprisingly the entire process is actually quite thorough and looks something like this:
• Simple tools such as post-it notes to capture, check requirements and priorities
• Initial sketches / grey boxing to echo back
• Click-able prototype to confirm that we are going to deliver something that was wanted in the first place
• Design
• Build
• QA / Test / Training
• Go Live
The technology and techno babble in fact comes in only later. We can’t possibly “give you” a website at the very outset. We don’t know your business, your clients or your products. Our job at this point is just to get you talking. We could put on a German accent, use a desk lamp and turn a bright shining light on to you. “You vill talk”. Now, before you get the politically correct police on to us… we don’t do that and we love Germany, especially Heidelberg.
The point we are making is this. A process is needed to capture all the requirements. There will be a lot of sorting, rejecting and change of focus. When the client takes the post-its out of our hands, we know that we are onto a winner. The client is engaging, they are starting to own the process. They are starting to build the site. That is exactly what we want, a partnership approach that will lead to a win-win scenario.
If you think you don’t have to be put through all this hassle for a new website, let’s be honest, we know you could spend 50 quid and get your site done in Mumbai or Jakarta. Heck, you can even go to WordPress.com and get a site for free! (and sometimes that is the right thing to do.)
I hope you are still there with us after all this? Good, in that case we are going to get on quite well and I see a winning website shaping up in the horizon.
Hmmm, this stuff works for Social Media also?
