With the dramatic increase in digital marketing over the past decade, it is crucial for a business or organization to have a user-friendly, informative, functional website. This is a large task and one that we don’t take lightly. So when current or potential clients approach us about a website, we begin the project with what we call the discovery process.
The discovery process uncovers the specific requirements of your project, both identifying and documenting them. These requirements are then used to define the scope of your project. We can’t stress enough the importance of identifying the scope since it helps to lay out the agreed upon work that is to take place.
The scope document is continually referred to during the development phase of any web project and is necessary to help any project remain on time and on budget as well as help you understand where your project plan is at any given point. If it helps, think of the scope as the blueprints for a house—everyone involved is continually referring back to them as your house is being built.
With projects that involve marketing-only websites, the discovery process may be as brief as a single, one-hour meeting. As the complexity of projects increases, so can the duration of this discovery process. In fact, at times, we may treat the discovery process as a stand-alone project in which a scope document is the final deliverable. Once again, this is analogous to hiring an architect to create those house blueprints.
For Pleth, the objective of the discovery process is to construct a project proposal and provide you with a price and in-depth understanding of what you should expect out of your investment. This way, once we dive headfirst into your web marketing, we’re all on the same page and can easily work together to achieve your goals.