G-Eight Development Cycle

Information gathering

We use multiple techniques to gather business requirements and corporate information:

• One-on-one interviews: The most common technique for gathering requirements is to sit down with the customer and ask what he or she needs. The discussion is planned ahead of time based on the type of requirements we’re looking for. The interview might be tailored to discuss current processes, uncover future needs, or determine the problems the customer is trying to resolve. These interviews might take place on location or via online media such as Skype.
• Group interviews: These interviews have a similar purpose to the one-on-one interview, but they require more preparation (from you as client as well)  We are in this was able to uncover a richer set of requirements in a shorter period of time since your Coach will be able to keep the group focused. These interviews can be conducted in an online Skype group session as well!
• Facilitated sessions: In this technique, we get a much larger group together and potentially keep them together until all the requirements are gathered. This may require the attendance of all primary and secondary stakeholders to make sure no piece of the requirements puzzle is overlooked. These sessions requires heavy preparation and we use trained facilitators to keep the group on track and functioning productively. These Sessions are only used in very large projects.
• Questionnaires: This approach is much more informal and might have limited value in some occasions where the information is not internally verified or tuned with stakeholders. Questionnaires are good tools to use with stakeholders in remote locations or with those who will have only minor input into the overall requirements. A questionnaire also provides us with valuable means of gathering quick statistics, such as the number of people who would use certain features and gives us a sense of the relative priority of requirements. The Questionnaires we use are online available for our clients in pdf-format.

Are you capturing the economic benefits that the Internet creates?

Internet technology provides better opportunities for companies to establish distinctive strategic positionings than did previous generations of information technology. Gaining such a competitive advantage does not require a radically new approach to business. It requires building on the proven principles of effective strategy.

Many of the companies we have assisted with their online presence succeeded since they are the ones that use the Internet as a complement to traditional ways of competing and by listening to our experiences and implemented our guiance do not belong now to those that set their Internet initiatives apart from their established operations.

Michael Porter outlined six principles that he believes companies need to follow if they want to establish and maintain a distinctive strategic position in the market place.

Since the internet is a business platform with low barriers to entry, these six strategic principles are particularly relevant to any company that wants to be profitable online and GWS-Studio with it's G-Eight Cycle approach helps you to generate awareness, interest and sales based on these 6 primciples:

1. Stand for something
In order for a company to develop unique skills, build the right assets, and establish a strong reputation it is important to define what the company stands for so that the company will have continuity of direction.

2. Focus on profitability
This point seems obvious, however many internet based companies have instead focused on “unique visitors” and “page views” as measures of performance. At the end of the day, sustainable profits will only be possible where goods or services can be provided at a price which exceeds the cost of production.

3. Offer consumers a unique set of benefits
Good strategy involves being able to provide a distinct set of benefits to a particular group of consumers. Trying to please every consumer will not give a company a sustainable competitive advantage.

4. Perform core activities differently
If a company is able to establish a distinctive value chain by performing key activities differently from its competitors, then this will help the company establish a sustainable competitive advantage.

5. Specialise
There is no competitive advantage to being a jack of all trades and a master of none. Make trade-offs.  By focusing on certain activities, services or products at the expense of others a company can establish a unique strategic position.

6. Ensure that all activities reinforce the company’s strategy
All of a company’s activities are interdependent and, as a result, they must be coordinated so as to reinforce the company’s overall strategy. A company’s product design, for example, will affect the manufacturing process and the way that products are marketed. By coordinating all of its activities, a company makes it harder for competitors to imitate its strategy.

Website Planning

Once we have gathered all information and have defined our online positioning we will be able to create for you a Master Project Plan that will address the conclusions of the previous steps, in particular the translation of the gathered information, possible changes in organization and business processes in close relation with the Customer Relationship Management and its online positioning.

A successful web development requires attention to several strands of activity. The Master Project Plan will be drawn up with milestones, resources and dates. Development of the information architecture and agreeing quantity and quality of content are crucial elements in determining resources needed. The project planning will address amongst others the following main activities:

User Experience is crucial for success!

This Phase of the Site development is essential for the success of your online presence. This is where you need to understand by now based on the previous steps that:

So careful consideration based on what has been discussed and set in the previous steps of G-Eight Cycle:

• Interface
• Usability
• The flow within the site between pages and sections: Consistency!
• Loading speed of information
• Graphical elements
• No overkill with text (remember that an images says more than a thousand word?)
• Technical elements eg. CSS and HTML5-conventions and browser issues

We will create based on these considerations Graphical Mockups of the Interface and a Story Board which is used to organize the ideas and thoughts and which will lead to a wireframe/site-map which will be the basis for the actual creative process in the next steps

Programming/Construction

During this phase the development Team, under guidance form the Project Manager, will actually build the website based on the designplan and the schedule outlined in the Planning. GWS-Studio utilizes as many possible ready-made extensions (Joomla) or modules (Drupal) to minimize tailored software. Reason for this is maintainability in case of upgrades of these components of a web-site. Of course we cannot always avoid to code in PHP your specific requirements but these tailor made blocks will be isolated as much as possible for the reasons mentoned (maintainability).

The development will take place in full daylight, online on our development servers so our Clients will be able to follow online the progress of the construction and feed-back comments and requests through the by GWS-Studio used Project Task and Management System. PTMS is an online Project Collaboration Tool and is a highly successful instrument for interacting with our clients.

Depending on the arrangements with your Project Manager you will be able to access the respective admin panels already to add for instance your content in case this is not part of the work we need to do  for your website. This reduces your development cycle and you will be much quicker online. The other advantage is that we train you through this method "on-the-fly". Where needed we can use online Project Sharing (We use Oneeko in combo with Skype to actually show you in Real-time specific issues)

Every piece of development which is being considered completed is thoroughly tested during the construction phase by specialists on the specific application part before the site is being transferred for quality testing and insurance. This assures that we will process a site to the testing teams in the next phase which from a technical point of view is as good as technical possible and complete.

Quality Assurance & Testing

Testing plays a critical role in the development of your web site and its long-term maintenance. While smaller web sites – especially those with more limited budgets – may not need to follow the formal testing procedures that are required for large-scale, commercial web sites, every site needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it’s error-free, user-friendly, accessible, and standards compliant.

Our development teams complete testing during each phase of a site’s development. Two of the most costly web project mistakes are to delay testing until just before launch, or not to test at all. Testing during production makes it for us easier to locate and resolve errors, and minimizes the chance of existing bugs being replicated throughout later stages of development. Early and continued testing can eliminate the need for the costly redesigns and other major fixes that can result from overlooked errors.

We have adapted standard test procedures and a website launch checklist is being used to assure we do not miss any piece of the sites development or associated activities. You can review this list by downloading the pdf.

Promotion & Internet Marketing

Few people realize that one of the most important aspects of website promotion is the actual development of the website. While most customers don’t know the difference between a properly developed website and an improperly developed website, search engines know the difference. Properly formatting your content for SEO is vital in promoting a site and we give great attention in this phase og G8 to these aspects. Each page needs unique content without duplications.

Our SEO-specialists will, with the help of dedicated tools, formulate keywords and metatags for all pages and generate proper Title and Descriptions for your pages and create a very Search engine friendly site. Verification and proper content verification is part of this phase. Of course if not setup we will also cater for your webmaster account on Google, Bing and Yahoo for instance and produce proper sitemaps to be uploaded to these search engines

Operational Usage & Maintenance

The development of your web site is not necessarily over, though. One way to bring repeat visitors to your site is to offer new content or products on a regular basis. You also will need added value with new functionality from time to time. Your website needs ongoing security monitoring and checks, version upgrades and compatibility checks.

In this phase we will define with you as client your operational website management and implement procedures so as to ensure 99.9% site uptime, with automatic monitoring and notification for site content or functional outages. Establish backup and escalation procedures and implement the monitoring tools for Google analytics for instance/example. We will advise on your webmaster tasks and procedures. A good reference is found on the website of our sister company GWS-Desk.com providing these services to our clients