To help achieve a customer's marketing and communication goals, we work with you to plan your approach to your web activity. For a simpler project, we use relevant parts of this process. Here is what might be involved.

Defining your project

There are a number of ways that we can define the scope and scale of your Internet project.

Initial meeting

Our initial meeting with you allows us to introduce our businesses to each other. Our account management staff will develop a broad understanding of your needs and the scale of your project. This meeting may result in Multibase preparing a quotation for your project; if the project requires customised development, we will propose the preparation of a detailed specification as the first stage of the project.

Needs analysis

For the best chance to gain the most from your investment, we may work with you to investigate your purpose, your target markets, and the form of web strategy that will best suit these.

From these processes, the structure and content of the site readily emerge, and there can be immediate ownership by the various stakeholders of the process and product of the site. From this, we may develop a document which maps the proposed shape of the project, gives you enough information to commit time and funds to the project, and results in an order from you for Multibase to undertake the next stage of the project.

Dialogue

Sometimes it may be necessary to undertake a half- to one day dialogue process with appropriate members of the organisation to address the following issues:

• What needs to be created with your site?
• Why is it needed and what would your proposed project need to do to fill that need?
• What outcomes would realise that mission?
• What strategies will create these outcomes?
• What blocks would prevent these outcomes?

Detailed study 

We can study the shape of your existing information, product and aservice assets, as well as the organisation's corporate knowledge and skills that can be "repurposed" for the concept of your project. This is applicable whether your requirement is for a publicly-available web site, an online “shopfront”, an intranet, or an information delivery system.n this process, we consider issues such as:

• Target markets
• Site objectives
• Search engine and directory strategy
• Link strategy
• Site content to measure success
• Content categories
• Target market analysis
• Content for added functionality
• Marketing the site to browsers
• Content renewal
• Site responsibiities.

We can conduct an analysis by discussion with key personnel, or we can conduct a session on your site or in our office. The outcome of this process is to develop appropriate site structure and navigation, to propose content that will meet the identified needs of your organisation, and to provide lively and relevant content for the site. It may provide strategies for marketing the site to potential customers and through the Web.

Specialist analysis

Sometimes more detailed market research or business development consultancy is required. If your business requires a broader and more specialised consultancy to determine your marketing or business process objectives, Multibase can collaborate with other specialists.

Specification

If your project needs can be satisfied through our standard service packages, there is no need for us to prepare a specification.

If custom development work is required, the dialogue and study work may be used as the basis of a detailed specification, which provides an easily-grasped set of staged strategies and goals for the development of your web activity. This first specification, when agreed by you, becomes the basis for work on the project. It will include a “road map” of the project, preliminary costing and timing information, and other relevant information.

We consider it important that this does not just offer technological solutions but addresses human resource/organisational management issues as well. The plan can be published and shared with appropriate stakeholders, to keep them involved in the process. It should be a plan which is both proactive, and also potentially reactive to changing circumstances should they arise.