Our analysis includes reviews of your competitors' sites, customer surveys to define their requirements, and a review of your marketing strategies.

The objectives of the Analysis Phase are to define the Site Design Goals:

• Business Goals - why is the site being created and how will it benefit your business? e.g. increase sales, increase customer acquisition, decrease sales/support costs...
• Target Audience - who are they? e.g. new internet users, power users...
• Customer Goals - why are they interested in your site and what do they expect to do here? e.g. buy products, find information, connect with other people...
• Site Messages - what should you site communicate? - e.g. friendly, helpful, secure, easy to deal with...

This phase defines the site structure, navigation, and how functionality is presented to produce the required results for both your business and customers. Directed by the Design Goals from the previous phase, several design concepts are developed to explore different ways for delivering site functionality and content. These designs are used to collect customer feedback to assess the strengths and weakness of each design. As it is rare that a single design contains "all the best ideas" at the outset, this approach has proven to be effective in developing more complete and effective solutions.

The visual design phase defines how the site's content will be graphically presented. The overall "look and feel" of the site is established to address business objectives, user goals and site messages. All graphic elements of the site need to work well together, conveying a consistent visual design and a positive image of the company and its brand. Visual design will be driven by decisions made in the previous stage and must enhance and support usability, not confuse or cloud understanding. Visual design concepts are also tested with customers.

The specification phase focuses on development of a site simulation and the documentation required to implement the site design. Page design templates are developed for the site's main functions and processes. By linking these pages together the site's functionality can be simulated for customer testing. After the feedback has been analyzed and any required design changes made the User Interface Specification is created. It documents the site design and functionality, which was based on business requirements and Design Goals. This specification significantly streamlines implementation as it documents, in detail, what the site will look like and how it will operate.

Catalyst will work with the development team to ensure the final design meets the functionality and business requirements as documented in the User Interface Specification and Site Simulation. This phase also includes analysis of Beta Testing results and feedback.