At Venture, we embrace an agile workflow where everyone works closer together in a live and functional development version of your new website. This allows the design process to unfold simultaneously in desktop, tablet, and Smartphone browser environments without falling victim to designing for one at the expense of the others. We keep everything simple:
Plan >>> Integrated design & development via feedback workshop >>> Launch
Project Management
Your dedicated project manager handles everything from setting up the communications platforms to scheduling meetings. Every platform used in the process is provided by UpStage and will continue to be used for your year-round support and education activity.
Default communications platforms:
- Basecamp
- Zoom
Emergency communications platforms
- Office phone
- Text
Unique development environments
- Production (your live site)
- Staging (a sandbox to learn and experiment)
Design Principles
Instead of forcing users to adapt to a design. We prioritize user needs by building interfaces that adapt to them, using well-established psychology principles as our guide. Our UX/UI design practice can be broken down into for primary practices:
- Heuristic: when users discover for themselves.
- Principle: intuitive and simple interfaces for complex data.
- Gestalt: when users group together content.
- Cognitive Bias: when users to draw incorrect conclusions for large amounts of data.
Data & Content Migration
The migration process includes working with you to set take full advantage of the opportunity to update and improve your content and navigation architecture.
- Venture will handle frontend accessible content and meta from existing publishing platform to new WordPress database.
- If needed, Venture can be responsible for all formatting conversion.
- Content migration can include only your upcoming season or as many as one or all of your archived events.
How Long Does the Process Take?
The actual amount of time it takes to depends on a few basic factors:
- The amount of content you expect to use at the new website.
- How much of that content can be ported over verbatim from the existing website.
- Whether or not your new website will incorporate custom programming and/or graphic design.
- The amount of in-house or outsourced resources you plan to allocate to the project.
- Fortunately, Venture is there to help out at every step in the process with our included support and feedback through varying degrees of custom coding, graphic design, and project management upgrade options.
We’ve seen users get a new site up and running in less than two weeks whereas others have opted to take a few months to complete the work. Either way, you never have to worry about your current site being interrupted and there are no deadlines other than those set by the actual users so you can take as long as you like.
Need more time? No problem, take it. Want to sprint from beginning to end? Done. We’ll work with whatever timeline you need.
Feedback Workshops
One of the cornerstones to Venture’s success is embracing the live development environment over the static back and forth of image based mockups and wireframes. Granted, there will still be static design elements to review but we combine those with the live development environment so you can experience how these elements work together alongside dynamic aspects such as how web fonts render on different browsers and devices.
You also get to experience how your branding elements work in different device states, like hover, tap, click, active, and disabled.
In the end, our goal is to help reduce inefficiencies of designing through static visuals; all of which is accomplished by providing two primary participation tools:
- Conducting a series of feedback workshops inside the live development environment where we walk you and your team members through recent update.
- Providing 24/7 access to the live development environment to encourage participation and let you play with the responsive design in order to become familiar and comfortable with it.
Yes, We Can Use Your In-House Or Third Party Resources
Although we have all of the design and development resources you could need, we are always happy to work hand in hand with your graphic designer or other development professional. To this end, we strongly suggest the following before actively engaging your in-house or third party provider with any sort of active design work:
- Put us in touch: in order to make the process as productive as possible, it’s good for everyone to get to know one another. In particular, we like to make sure the folks we’re working with understand the responsive platform environment and all of the genuinely cool features it provides.
- Require 100% participation: nothing sidetracks a project better than key development team members floating in and out of the process.
