- 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
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Setting Up Staging Areas
The staging area acts as a hub of communication. Divide it into two sections: a client staging site and a team development area. For the client, or internal decision-makers, set up a central HTML staging area to post all deliverables and project documentation [3.17] and [3.18]. Although email is very effec tive for transmission of information, for work in progress, and as a point of administrative reference (email links, schedules, etc.), create and use these staging areas.
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none 3.17 The Catchword staging area shows one way to set up a client staging site. Four primary sections divide the posted deliverables into contacts, design, production, and documentation.
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none 3.18 The jessicabenson.com staging site is even simpler. It is a much smaller project with a much smaller team, so a single page of links suffices.
Reserve a spot on your own server for the team development area. Password protect it. The team develop ment area serves as a place to stage and view work-in-progress. It is not for client viewing. It becomes very handy for projects with team members working remotely and needing FTP access and is ideal for developing an HTML alpha site.
For the client, or internal decision-makers, set up a central HTML staging area to post all deliverables and project documentation. Whether you call it a "client site" or a "project site," this staging area should be kept simple, easy to maintain, and current. Consistency and organization will reflect your professionalism.
Once you set up the staging area, make sure the client bookmarks it and is reminded via email when the site is updated. With each reminder include the URL, username, and password so neither the client nor the team has to look it up each time.