Making a website is more then making pretty picture and some sales jargon. You have to fully understand the project, your audience, current traffic trends and the even more important – the business goals before every writing a line of code.

1. RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
PHASE: PROJECT PLANNING
By James Tryon, Creative Director
WP Valet & Easily Amused, Inc.

2. EACH PROJECT IS DIFFERENT
We work as a team to:
• Explore the problems
• Challenges
• Goals
We define full scope and vision of the project together.
We works in an Agile fashion to make sure your needs
are addressed.

3. INTERNAL REVIEW MEETING
This is after the first sales call

4. INTERNAL REVIEW MEETING
We gather all the internal people that are going to be
working on your project together and review your
Creative Brief, the Client Questionnaire, the current site,
current Brand Image and top competitors.
!
This is a quick meeting no more than a hour or 2. At the
end of the meeting we create a basic outline of what we
think is best and the easiest way to attack the problem.

5. INTERNAL REVIEW MEETING
• Review Client Questionnaire
• Review Clients Site
• Review Creative Brief
• Review Competitors
• Basic Brand Analysis
• Internal Analysis

6. GET SOME MONEY
Don’t work for free. Your thoughts are worth more than your code.

7. GET SOME MONEY
Client should know about how much the
project should cost before going into this phase.
Or you can use this process to find the real
price of a project.
!
You can always just do this yourself to fully
understand your total project scope.

8. DISCOVERY
What goes into truly planning a site?
!
Understanding

9. WHAT GOES INTO TRULY
PLANNING A SITE?
• Research
• Goal Planning
• Target Audience
• Users Stories
• Competitor Analysis
• Content Strategy - Basic
• Project Audit
• Content Strategy

10. KICK OFF MEETING
You want to get to know the project, the business and the
audiences of your client.

11. OPEN THE FLOODGATES
The sky’s the limit in this meeting and is used to spark
creativity and get everyone involved in the project motivated.
!
Do a group brain-dump. Anything and everything that you
could ever want, we just write it down. Then we sort all of
them into 3 piles.
!
1) Needed
2) Nice to have
3) Cool but not really needed now.

12. HOW LONG IS THE MEETING?
Small project
- Half day with client
- Half day Internal
!
Larger projects get broken up across days
not to burn out the client.
!
Everyone who is going to be involved in the
project should to be in this meeting.

13. WHO’S YOUR TARGET
AUDIENCE AND WHY
Personas
•late 50’s blue collar worker
with limited computer use
!
•Tired single Mother very
busy and very tired
!
•car accident victim looking
for pain relief
Facts
• in pain so kinda agitated
!
• it might hurt to use the
mouse
!
• older demographic
Thoughts
• need large buttons to help
with clicking
!
• very direct messaging to limit
on confusion
!
• Too much text / cluster could
be overwhelming

14. USER STORIES
A user Story Defines a use case for Task that you want
a user to be able to do on your site.
(A user story is one or more sentences in the
everyday or business language of the user that
captures what the user wants to achieve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story

15. USER STORY EXAMPLE
“As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>”
!
!
“As a customer representative, I want to search for my customers
by their first and last name to find the customer faster.”

16. QUESTIONS WE TRY TO
ANSWER DURING OUR
KICKOFF MEETING
Some of these questions are handled during sales and covered
in our questionnaire.

17. MEETING QUESTIONS
#1: Problem Statement
What problem do you want to solve?
#2: Stakeholders
Who do you answer to? Who is involved in this project?
#3: Users
Who are you users?
!
#4: Risks
What risks are we afraid of?
What is worst case scenario?

18. MEETING QUESTIONS
#5: Assumptions
!
Examples:
1. Client will provide high quality videos in a timely fashion.
2. Client will provide high quality photos in a timely fashion.
3. Client will provide descriptions for products.
4. Client will provide feedback on layout designs in a timely
fashion.
!
#5: List of Features NOT to be developed
if you're used a gateway, make sure the client knows you
are not creating it.

19. STAKEHOLDERS MEETING
When working on large projects with several
stakeholders we meet with all of them.
!
We like to have some one-on-one time with each
stakeholder to be able to pick their brain, Find out
what's most important to them without the influence
of everyone else in the meeting.

20. PROJECT AUDIT
what’s in a project audit?

21. WHAT’S IN A PROJECT AUDIT?
• list of Overall Goals
• list any Client Feedback
• Problems with Current site
• Define target Audience
• Current Navigations
• New Site Map
• Question everything
• Review every page
• Review every section
• Have a stand alone page for
header and footer
• Overall Thoughts

22. PROJECT AUDIT PER PAGE/SECTION
• list page title and url
• Goals of the page
• Current feature list
• New Feature list
• Current Problems
• Solution per section and/or
page
• Feedback from client
•Wish list/backlog/Nice to
Haves
• Design feedback
• Other Notes - Any random
ideas per page and section
• Client To Do’s per page and
sections

23. WHAT’S IN A PROJECT AUDIT?
• Page outlining any new features sections not on current site
• list any possible or key plugins
• Page for extra Ideas
• List of posable templates needed for theme

24. LIST OF TEMPLATES NEEDED
Home
Shows
◦ archive
◦ category
◦ tag
◦ Show single
Events
◦ archive
◦ category
◦ tag
◦ single event
!
• blog
◦ archive
◦ category
◦ tag
◦ single post
• Team directory
• 404
• Single page
• search results

25. DISCUSS POSSIBLE CONTENT
STRATEGIES
How and when to use tags and categories, along with a
starter list of rules when making new category and tag.
!
- What Custom Post Types does the project need
- What Taxonomies does the project need
- What Parent Categories to start with.
- Along with setting a game plan for growth.

26. PHASE #2
Things currently out of scope.

27. OVERALL RECAP THOUGHTS
And All The Other Things

28. RESOURCES CREATED
• Brain dumps
• Sorted feature list
• Define Goals / user stories
• Create user stories
• Define target Audience
• Site map
• Basic wire frames(paper)
• Lots of sketching
• Stockholder Interviews
• Talk about inspiration
• Basic guides for colors
• Basic guides for layout
• Assigned Client Tasks
• Start content gathering
• Compile assists

29. WIREFRAMES / USER
EXPERIENCE
Not really part of this talk ;c )

30. WIREFRAMES / USER
EXPERIENCE
We Take everything we have created, gather and sketched
out so far and pull it all together to product the bases of
your site. We are setting up the overall hierarchy,
Navigation, Placement of content, the amount of content,
defining all the functions of any custom plugins and theme
modifications.
!
This Step is about placement and content not design as in
colors and or images. This is key because once we have the
layouts and list of functions the Developers can start to
work their magic and the designers can start to put on all
the palish.

31. WIREFRAMES / USER
EXPERIENCE TASKS
• UX design
• Detailed Wireframes
• Content Audit
• Programmer audit
• Design Audit
• Usability Testing Round #1
• Final Site Map

32. THANK YOU ;C )
james@thewpvalet.com
http://thewpvalet.com
James@easilyamusedinc.com
http://easilyamusedinc.com
!
@jamestryon @easilyamused