Intent Driven Design

One of the reasons we can afford to take all of the risk when developing websites is the power of the process we use. We have refined the Intent Driven Design process over a number of years to take the best ideas used to develop multi-million dollar websites, refining them to make them efficient enough to work for our clients much smaller budgets.

We have written articles and taught courses on Intent Driven Design. It has been carefully crafted over the years to create the optimal development process for sub-$50,000 web applications to provide you with the benefits of the processes used on big budget sites - without breaking the bank. Here is a short overview of the process.

• Business Intent - Why bother building the site? If you don't know where you're going you are unlikely to get there. We are only interested in working with clients who are looking to achieve clear objectives online.
• Essential Tasks (Essential Use Cases) - What specific tasks does the site need to facilitate to achieve its business intent(s)? Where appropriate, we also ask "what's in it for your users?" There is no point building a site unless there is a compelling reason for your target audiences to use it.
• Packages, Screens and Actions - Once we know the functionality that the site must provide, we can work with you to select a combination of proven, tested, highly customizable packages that we've developed in the past along with any truly custom functionality you might require. This allows us to develop the application as efficiently as possible.
• Information Architecture - Once we know the functional requirements, we work with you to agree the structure of the site and supplementary navigational elements, so we can design the structure of the home page template, site template and supporting content areas to make your site easy to use.
• Functional Wireframe - The next step is to build the application so you can test the functionality to make sure it supports all of the essential tasks.
• Training - At this point, you have a functioning website, so we provide training on using the site.
• Content Population - We then ask you (or we can bring in a third party) to handle populating the site content, so we'll be able to see the real site with actual content before we implement the look and feel.
• Graphic Design - With a functional site, real content and an information architecture designed to help your users to achieve their essential tasks, it is now time to work with you to develop a look and feel that supports your brand and positioning, providing a professional look and feel to the completed application.
• Deployment - Once the site is ready to go live, we work with you to plan and implement an efficient deployment strategy to make sure the process of putting the new site is seamless and trouble free.
• Support - Some of our clients are quite happy running their own sites. Others want anything from ongoing consulting to a turn key service where we create and populate new content on a regular basis to keep their site fresh. As part of the website development process, we develop an ongoing support plan to ensure you get access to all of the help you need without paying for anything you don't require.

Find out if you qualify to get a great website developed without any risk.

• Removing the Risk
• Why SystemsForge?
• Solving Business Problems
• Intent Driven Design
• What Will This Cost?
• What We're Looking For

Systemsforge News

November 14, 2007 - New website launched! We've still got some work to do on the look and feel, but we wanted to get the message out ASAP - we're officially open for (new) business.

October 25, 2007 - Just finished presenting our solution at ooPSLA in Montreal.