What do we offer?
Performing a full assessment of your existing website can deliver substantial benefits: learning valuable lessons that you can then be sure not to repeat. Equally, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your peer group can help identify where your site should fit into its market, what standards it should adopt, and where opportunities lie to really stand out.
We can help assess every aspect of your existing site, and help you invent, plan and articulate your online strategy. These 'invisible' activities have an enormous impact on you, your organisation and your customers.
Our services can include:
- SiteReview evaluations: a range of packaged evaluation services.
- Evaluating your accessibility requirements - where you need to comply with the Disabilities Discrimination Act, and how to achieve compliance.
- Assessing your current site's usability to flush out the critical issues from the perspective of your customers.
- Auditing your existing site content and assessing the quality and consistency of written and visual content.
- Performing a full market evaluation to assess the standards of your competitors, peers, and related sites visited by your customers.
- Facilitating internal workshops and brainstorm sessions to help identify and articulate requirements and ideas for the future.
- Creating reports and presentations to share within your organisation.
- Producing clear, comprehensible strategy documents to help you follow an agreed strategic plan.
- Periodic reviews to ensure that you stay on-track.
Why bother?
Evaluation and strategy are two of the most overlooked areas of interactive design: most people believe that they're just not necessary, unfortunately. Here are just a few of the reasons you should give it serious thought:
- Certainty: you can move forward secure in the knowledge that you really understand where weaknesses were, and how to avoid them in future.
- Cost-efficiency: you can easily identify the areas of your site or service that are critical, and spend the money where it really matters.
- Market fit: you can be sure that your site will fit in to the standards expected by your customers.
- Competitive advantage: you can understand your competitors better, identify opportunities within your marketplace and exploit them in your new developments.
- Buy-in: you can more easily secure support from your organisation for a well thought out, substantiated, strategic plan and it will be easier to maintain your site to a high standard.
Frequently asked questions.
- I have a limited budget, should I spend any on evaluation and strategy?
Yes! Even with a very constrained budget, a simple analysis of your existing site will prove valuable as you can be sure you are using your budget on the most important areas. And remember, we offer a basic expert analysis for free, so you've nothing to lose.
- How long should my online strategy last?
Strategy is not a one-off event: it provides an objective basis for the work you carry out on your website, and it should change and adapt as your organisation and customers do. Given the nature of the internet, a 2 year rolling plan is sensible as this allows you to tie in to budget cycles etc easily.
- How long does an evaluation take?
As you would expect, this varies by project. As a guide, expert analysis can be carried out in a matter of days, with comprehensive studies involving customer focus groups, etc lasting up to 6 weeks.
- How do I get everyone behind our strategy?
The best way, in our experience, is to involve key people in shaping it, and ensure that the strategy is well communicated to everyone that it affects in your organisation. We typically use techniques like workshops and interviews to ensure that we listen to everyone who has a role to play in the website. Remember, your strategy is not a document, it's an active plan that is there to help your organisation do the right thing, so get people involved early.
