The process begins with an analysis of your needs. We will do a preliminary analysis of your project so that we may determine which our of services you will require. Some clients have fairly robust documentation detailing the requirements of a web project. In this case, our role will be primarily development. In other cases, our clients merely had a concept that they needed implemented. As a result, they requested our full suite of services in order to fully realize that concept. In any case, at the end of this step you will receive an estimate of services and fees as well as a project timeline.

When required, our Strategy and Business Analysis services will work with you to formalize your strategy and business requirements. For more information about the services rendered during this step see Strategy and Business Analysis. The key deliverable in this phase is the business requirements document which outlines processess and application functionality.

During this phase we will engineer the execution plans for the business requirements. This takes the "what" of the business requirements and describes the "how". For more information about the services rendered in this phase see Functional Architecture and Web Design in Design Services. The key deliverables of this phase are the style guide and use cases. Once these documents are near completion, we will schedule as many review sessions as necessary with you. Working together we will finalize these requirements.

Traditionally, this phase is intended to feed our internal development efforts. Occassionally, however, a client may request to bring the development "in-house". In either situation, a set of documents are produced and published to complete this milestone. Technical documents include class diagrams, network topologies, server architecture diagrams and database schemas. See our Design Services for more information.

Once all requirements have been finalized and approved, we move onto development. During this phase we will take the requirements and turn them into a tangible working product. We employ Rapid Application Development techniques which allows us to produce work at a greater speed and lower cost. Because work happens concurrently across all levels of development, the next deliverable will be a working application. For more information about the services rendered during this phase see our Development Services.

This phase is meant to ensure that the working product meets your needs. While we will do our best to communicate, both verbally and in documentation, the business and functional requirements in our review sessions, we understand that such abstract concepts may be difficult to truly evaluate until you have a tangible application. During this phase you will have access to our dedicated QA server to test and evaluate your appplication.

Once we have approval during QA testing, we will schedule a launch date. "Launch" consists of all the elements required to integrate the application into your live production systems. If you don't have an existing IT environment, we will work with you to establish one.

This is an optional phase and intended to "close the loop" on the project cycle. The Internet is in constant evolution. In order to compete and truly take advantage of this evolution, a website must evolve as well. Once the application has been under use for an appropriate amount of time, it should be analyzed to see what works and what doesn't and identify areas for improvement. Analysis of web statistics (visitors, referrals, page views...) and conversion goals (how many people completed a task that was critical to impacting key performance indicators) is crucial to feed this understanding. We will factor this information into the strategy and business requirements and produce a needs document of suggested areas of improvement. This document will then initiate a new project cycle and introduce us, once again, to the first step of Needs Analysis.