- Gathering Information
- Understanding Your Audience
- Analyzing Your Industry
- Understanding Discovery
- Determining Overall Goals
- Preparing a Communication Brief
- Creating a Project Plan
- Setting the Budget
- Creating Schedules
- Assigning Your Project Team
- Setting Up Staging Areas
- Planning for User Testing
- Kicking Off the Project
- Phase 1 Summary
Analyzing Your Industry
Some projects have the luxury of a contracted or in-house marketing team. These researchers run exhaustive market and audience research and in-depth competitive analyses. An analysis this extensive, however, is not usually an option for most projects in which budget and time are real considerations. No matter the budget level, however, spend time looking at the competition and the industry. Look at the current, outgoing site's features and learn about the online features that competitors use. What is working? What isn't? All this will greatly help you learn about your audience. With this information, you will be better armed to re-create and redesign a successful website.
You can do a cursory analysis, but we highly recommend expanding Discovery by conducting a competitive analysis. See Chapter 10 for a detailed discussion of methodology for this process.