Process

Why do people do business with you?

• Because you’re a family owned and operated company?
• Because you’ve been slogging along for 126 years?
• Because you have sterling customer service?
• Great prices and cool sales assistants?

You may have all these things going for you, but it’s probably not why your customers come to you. And it’s not the stuff that’s really going to persuade potential customers to do business with you.

There’s something special about your business, and it isn’t even completely defined by your Unique Value Proposition. You know what’s special about you – trust us. It’s just that you don’t know you know it, or you don’t think it’s important enough. So it isn’t something you communicate to your potential customers.

The iBizInitiatives Process.

Skillful uncovery is the first necessary step toward designing and developing an effective presentation of your message. Neglecting this phase would be the architectural equivalent of constructing a building but omitting the footers! Uncovery is responsible for mapping objectives, developing strategy, understanding the customer's buying process, understanding and refining the sales process, researching keywords and key phrases and defining the key business metrics you will use. If you don't get the uncovery part right, we won't be able to help you define or measure success.

We know online success isn't about sitting there twiddling your thumbs hoping the traffic that makes it to your site takes action.  You have to be an active agent in the exchange – you have to persuade your visitors by interweaving the selling process with the buying process , consistently testing the direction you are heading by posing the WIIFM ( What's In It For Me ) question, all the while incorporating tenets of usability and best practices information architecture.

Creating a Customer Focused Website

Uncovery .  Skillful uncovery is the first necessary step toward designing and developing effective site architecture. Uncovery is responsible for mapping objectives, developing strategy, understanding the customer's buying process, understanding and refining the sales process, researching keywords and key phrases and defining the key business metrics.  The uncovery part must be done right, otherwise you can't define or measure success. 

Wire framing.  Wire framing defines the WHAT of the creative process.  It's a structural representation of click through possibilities and initial paths your visitors might take.  No pictures, no graphic design, just bare bones text and hyperlinks.  When we wire frame, we evaluate the entire Web site and all its primary interactions before we enter the more costly phase of programming.  Saves you time, saves you money!

Wire framed Web pages ideally contain the answers to the three questions essential to the persuasive process:

• What actions satisfy the objective?
• Who needs to be persuaded to take action?
• How do you persuade them most effectively to take action?

Story boarding  Story boarding focuses on HOW you go about accomplishing the WHAT.  It's the way you begin to flesh out your wire frame.  When you story board, you develop the persuasive copy that is going to grab your visitors' attention and motivate them through your site.  You begin to consider the graphic mockup, paying careful attention to scanning and skimming, applying the iBizInitiatives 4 second Rule, the priority of content and KISS (keep it simple stupid).  We first start with a color mockup and then a HTML mockup in which test download speeds, browser compatibilities, style sheets and tabular formats that help search engine spiders crawl the site.

Prototyping  As we interactively story board our way along, we eventually get to the point where we have a finished prototype of your Web site that will be identical to the actual final product.  It will meet the needs of the various individuals who visit your site.  It will offer them paths through the various scenarios that reflect their needs in the buying and selling process.  It will communicate relevance at every turn.

When both you and iBizInitiatives agree prototyping is complete, we freeze the prototype.  No other changes can be made – at least not in this version.

Development  Now, and only now, do we begin coding.  Every detail is specified in the prototype.  There's no need for guesswork.  Just keep in mind:  programming costs considerably more than planning – every hour you spend planning saves you roughly three hours in coding.  Our developers don't need to make choices for you – ones we will probably have to fix later on – they simply get to do what they do best:  code.

Optimization  The site works - Just as we intended it to.  We unleash it on the cyber-public, and then the fun begins.  Now that we have followed the process methodically and thoroughly, completing each phase in order without rushing the process or meandering through it, we now have a starting point for testing and measuring. We provide you with established and consistent strategy for monitoring your Web analytics.  It's really the only way to come full circle in the process, to determine how closely we met your objectives and how we can improve the results on every page that doesn't meet its responsibility.

And that's our process in a nutshell on one website page.