Every project begins with a good idea. Building a website or web application is a multi-disciplinary, multiple-step process, requiring careful planning and attention to detail. The five-step WDS process insures each project results in providing your users with an engaging experience.

Discovery

The discovery phase turns the gaseous state of your idea into a solid set of documents outlining the requirements, critical success factors, timeframe and budget figures. WDS works with you to define and refine the goals and objectives, and how these align to your target audience. WDS will assist customers in the preparation of the necessary documentation, and can provide guidance for some areas, but the customers are ultimately responsible for the definition of project requirements and the creation of content.

Design

The goal of the design phase is to create a prototype based on the requirements expressed during the discovery phase. The liquid process of prototyping comes in many shapes and sizes, and as such various prototype models are used depending on the nature of the project. Once approved, the prototype acts as the model for the technical development. Designing and building quality websites is only the first step in the process of conducting critical business functions on the Web. In many ways, relevant, well-positioned, up-to-date content is more important than splash design, and clever programming.

Develop

The planning is over - it's time to execute. With prototypes, content inventories and schedules mapped out, the WDS development team engages in the development work. Code is written and files are posted to the WDS staging environment for customer review and approval. [http://stage.yourdept.harvard.edu] Project costs are best contained by reducing redundant programming, and the efforts in the initial phases begin to pay off at this point. The details articulated in earlier phases allow for efficient execution, testing and approvals.

Deploy

From gaseous to liquid, your project reaches a solid state. The approved product is promoted into the WDS production environment. [http://www.yourdept.harvard.edu]

Manage

The two main components of managing your site are hosting the files and keeping the content within those files fresh. WDS hosts your web site on professionally managed servers in a secure, enterprise-class data center. To insure you keep your content up to date, WDS provides our customers with a vehicle1 for requesting web-site content updates.