An effective web presence

A well planned website for your organization can be a very valuable asset. The Internet is now the first resource which is utilized when information about a company or its services is needed. Your web presence will allow needed information to be accessed on a 24x7 basis and is an imperative to maximize customer communication as well as a competitive necessity.

When you are building your online presence, the most important aspect is your website. It is your hub and must leave a good first impression.

Regardless of the type of business or the size of the site, the basics are generally the same - planning & design, content development, and website creation. The points below describe the process that we follow at MTS:

Phase 1 – Site Planning & Design

Before a site can be designed effectively you should first consider your goals for you website. Items to be considered include:

• Site purpose and goals – What is the purpose of the site? Are we providing information, promoting a service, selling a product, or some combination of all three?
• Target audience – Is there a specific group of people that will be visiting the site?
• Content & Features - What types of information will the target audience be looking for? This might include facility locations, product information including material safety data sheets (MSDS), hours of operation, technical information, industry news, company news, educational information, online shopping carts, forums, blogs, etc.
• Registered users – Is there any information that you would like to be seen only by registered users? This might include product information, MSDS, etc.
• The websites of your competitors should be analyzed to determine how they are approaching their online presence. This provides valuable information that will enable the tailoring of your site to be unique and to standout from the competition.

Once these questions have been answered, MTS canl use the information to develop a site map. This map will list all main topic areas of the site, as well as sub-topics, if applicable. This serves as a guide as to what content will be on the site, and is essential to developing a consistent, easy to understand navigational system.

A site mock up will then be prepared for your approval. This will include a front page layout with navigation to other pages and layout of those pages. We will make adjustments that you suggest (generally one or two iterations are expected). After you approved the mock up we will proceed to Phase 2.

Phase 2 – Site Content Development

Content includes corporate logos, photographs, company information, product information, resources, etc. The customer is responsible for providing MTS this content using the approved mockup(s) and sitemap(s) as a requirements guide.

Any text will be provided in electronic format such as a plain text (.txt) or formatted document (.doc, .pdf). Images shall also be provided in electronic format (.jpg, .png, .gif) or high quality prints which are suitable for scanning. You should make sure that any content provided by you does not violate any copyright and that you have the right to use any content provided to MTS.

Phase 3 – Website Development

The development phase is the point where the design and content produced from Phases 1 and 2 are used as input to develop your website. MTS sets up sites on our hosted servers and populate the sites with the content you have provided.

When we are complete with the site development we will meet with you to test site functionality and for a final detail site review. Once you have given us your final approval we will ask that you point the domain names to our servers so that the sites may go live. This will be the official launch of your new sites and it is the viewable by the public!