The biggest mistake during any development project is the failure to plan—and to budget appropriately for that plan.

At Verndale we're often asked to respond to RFQs and provide insight into our processes. Well, we start with a requirements gathering phase (we call it Planning & Discovery), move into a design phase, and then enter a development phase which includes HTML production and engineering, QA, etc… you know the deal. To be honest, that’s not where Verndale differentiates itself.

Our difference is in our ability to drive conversation, to get you and your internal teams to better understand your needs. Now, I don’t consider myself a salesperson by any means; I’m a creative type, so my perspective is one from the trenches. I’m also not the person to ask about implementing your CMS (see Sean or Chris for that). I focus my attention on figuring out the best way to deal with details nobody is ready—or willing—to think about yet. It’s my job to force you, the client, to begin thinking about these details (in the most loving way possible, of course). I’ve built a lot of websites over the years and I know one thing is true: the better ones have gone through a more thoughtful planning process. I’m hoping this post will better demonstrate the value of that planning and share some of the planning tools the Verndale creative staff uses.

Quick side note: I should mention that Verndale works with a fairly diverse range of budgets and project sizes—as a result, our planning pricing model varies. Our sales staff will work with you throughout the sales cycle to identify which package makes the most sense for you.

For this post, I'll outline key planning tools we feel every project should have to build the best possible foundation for a development project. These tools will inspire further conversations about your business goals and challenges, and really allow us to gain better insight to your objectives.

The Essential Tools: a competitive evaluation, personas, a sitemap, and what we call a high fidelity prototype (the most important tool, in my opinion). I should stress, these aren’t all of the tools in our wheelhouse, but they are the tools that no planning project should go without.

A Competitive Evaluation
A competitive evaluation is a document that I, or one of our creative staff members, will draft. It ranks your competitors' sites based on the following criteria: Branding, Site Organization (Information Architecture), Design, Usability, Readability, Performance, Messaging and Content. This document's value is really two-fold.

First, it allows Verndale staff to get up to speed on your company and its market space. Then, the document comes to life for your organization when we meet to review it as well as your competitors' websites. That allows us to hear, firsthand, your likes and dislikes pertaining to the web. We also find it helps foster further conversation between you and Verndale, and among members of your own team.

Verndale also leverages this meeting to demonstrate some of the web trends we’ve found during the document's creation. Since this is one of our first planning meetings, we also find that it’s a nice ice breaker, allowing us all to know one another better.

Personas One of the first questions you'll hear Verndale ask is, “Who is your target audience and why?” Personas allow us to explore your answer beyond the obvious. Wikipedia defines personas perfectly:

Defining personas allows our design staff to better address your audience needs. It also triggers conversations with you about things like conversion goals and desired calls-to-actions, and segues into our next planning stage, Information Architecture.

Sitemap
Information Architecture is the art and science of organizing and labeling—websites, intranets, online communities, software—to support usability and findability. Whether your company is taking on the redesign of an existing website, or exploring how to best create taxonomies for a new product or offering, good IA planning is essential to the overall solution.

A series of internal and external meetings help us better define and redefine your IA. I feel this is a critical, essential step in our process and, if not given proper time, can lead to serious long-term issues.

A diagram document, which we call a sitemap, is one of the first deliverables during the IA discovery process, demonstrating how we may potentially organize your site. To get to this point, we discuss content, naming conventions, hierarchy and more. This document will become the blueprint for how we'll structure the site.

High Fidelity Prototypes
As mentioned earlier, I feel this is one of our more valuable tools. Prototyping is a means of exploring ideas before you invest in them. Like an architect who creates models from paper or virtual reality tools, a web designer creates mock-ups showing how users may interact with their designs. Our prototyping method allows clients to click through and interact with a wireframe of sorts.

We've found this to be a critical path in building consensus around different aspects of a given project: strategy, content hierarchy, layout, interactive features, etc. It’s also invaluable in making sure we address any usability or design problems, allowing us to adjust easily before we invest in the final design and technologies.

I hope sharing these tools has been helpful and insightful. I encourage you to reach out to us with any additional questions, or if you’re curious to see examples of the tools I’ve discussed. Call us at 866-942-VERN (8376).