Web Planning - MJS Blog

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Monday, June 7, 2004
Web Planning

I hope you had a good weekend.

Mine was great! My brother got married on Saturday and I was honored to be the best man.

The wedding was in Yountville, a small, quaint town in Napa County. The ceremony was very emotional which accompanied the very emotional and fun-filled reception. Everything went incredibly smoothly considering the anxiety most of us felt days and minutes before the wedding. But good planning ahead of time prevented any major catastrophes.

How does the saying go?

Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

Planning a wedding and planning a website - you could say - are similar in respect to preventing poor performance. At MJS Web Solutions we adhere to a 5 phase development system when designing websites.

These 5 phases ensure a successful website:

Strategic Planning – Or defining the project, is the first phase where goals and objectives are set and all necessary and critical content - both text and images – are gathered.
Developing Site Structure and Information Design - At this stage, only the content is constructed. No pictures or colors are represented at this stage. The content-view, site-view and page-view are all addressed at this stage.
Visual Design - At this phase the visual look of the site is created, including colors, fonts and images. This is where the graphic designers have a chance to shine; incorporating the site structure in phase 2 and the goals represented from phase 1.
Production and Quality Assurance - During this stage, the actual building process of the site takes place: Creating HTML pages, implementing scripting, integrating backend technology and testing the site before the official launch.
Launch and Beyond - At the final stage of development, the website is prepared and launched, registered with the search engines, ongoing maintenance is scheduled and the success of the site is measured.

Good planning, whether a wedding or website, will ensure everything goes smoothly without any surprises or major disruptions.

’til next time.