What is website discovery?
It Can Be the Key to Your Website's Success
One of the biggest challenges of any web design project is creating a website that fulfills the goals of the client, serves the needs of customers, and is aesthetically pleasing. This is why “discovery” is the most important meeting you can have before starting a web project.
A successful project should begin with discovery which includes research, analysis and developing a strategy for marketing your product or service online. Our goal is to define your business goals, pain points and how to deliver content to your website's visitors that will lead them through the customer journey.
The Discovery process helps us gather and organize as much information about your business as possible. The importance of discovery isn't always recognized and often bypassed due to concerns about time and money. However, without the discovery process, there is a chance that a site's development phase may not be successful and could result in production overspend due to misdirected development. We need to understand your business in order to provide an accurate estimate, strategy, and design. Identifying production requirements early in the project will help to reduce development time and budget.
Our process begins with a discovery phase to define your goals, constraints and requirements for a successful project. We'll meet with you and your key personnel to ensure that project goals and expectations are fully aligned and explore potential opportunities. We'll start by bringing clarity to your vision and concept and we'll work with you to develop a real understanding of your expectations.
The goal of discovery is to produce a blueprint of your project and identify how your company wants to be seen. If there’s a big gap between the current state of the company and where it wants to be, we’ll encourage focusing on the latter. When the discovery engagement is completed, you will receive the following information about the production process.
Information Architecture
We'll show you how the content should be organized, classified and expanded/reduced to match your goals and expectations. Using analytics we'll review how visitors are moving through your website, from which device and bounce rate, and more. A blend of Discovery and
Data-Driven Web Design will enable us to make recommendations and develop a successful website.
Wireframes
Wireframes are used to show how the content should be arranged on a web page providing the user access to the most relevant information with the least amount of effort. During this stage, we'll focus on the user experience and functionality of your web site.
Findings Report
The report will be the foundation for all project deliverables including what's required for each process function. This document also includes the system, performance, integration and interface requirements for your new website.
Including the discovery phase is one of the most important things you can do to achieve success. Following discovery's best practices can result in reducing project costs, shortening the development cycle, enhancing team productivity and most importantly, a much improved and more successful website.
Whether you are considering building a new website or redesigning an existing website, you should consider including Discovery in your search for a web developer. And for a redesign of a website, the discovery process should also include a review of data for visitor behavior, bounce-rates, devices used and more to produce a data-driven redesign of your website.
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