services: strategy
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Whether building the next Amazon.com or an online presence for your business, you need to form a strategy before you start to build. Direct Knowledge will help you ask the right questions. We will help you come up with answers that will work both in the short-term and over the span of several years.

Business Strategy
You need to integrate your 'business strategy' with your plans for using the web. You need to answer the following questions:

• How, over time, do you see your web presence complementing your business model?
• Will your web presence be primarily a marketing/advertising mechanism or will you increasingly conduct business via the web?
• What internal resources do you have (will you have) for producing web content and managing our web presence?

Answers to these questions will help you understand the scope of projects to build an ongoing, effective web presence.

Communication Strategy
You need to expand your 'communication strategy' to include web communications, both via the website and via email. You need to answer the following questions:

• Who is your audience (e.g. 'customers')?
• What do you want to tell them (e.g. 'we are a great place to buy stuff')?
• What do you want them to do (e.g. 'buy stuff')?
• What relationship do you want to have with them (e.g. 'they come back often to buy more stuff')?

Answers to these questions are crucial to help you build the right things for the right people.

All too often, websites are built by techies and engineers, who certainly know their technologies and products very well, but who haven't considered the needs of the audience. Websites are often built as 'monoliths', great piles of communication stuck out in the middle of the Internet for all to view, without any plans for periodic updates or customer dialogue.

Technology Strategy
You need to devise a 'technology strategy' for your web presence to integrate with your business, communication and existing technology strategies. You need to answer the following questions:

• What resources, including both technology and people, do you have (will you have) to contribute to web projects?
• How does your web presence need to be integrated with your business/staff and your existing information systems?
• Given your target audiences, and the functionality that you plan to offer, what development technologies should you use (e.g. systems, languages, databases)?

Requirements Definition
Based on the strategies that we have developed, we need to identify the specific requirements for the project. What specific objectives need to be met? What information needs to be presented? What functionality needs to be delivered? What volume of activity do we need to accommodate (e.g. hits, bandwidth, users, transactions, database entries)?

The 'requirements definition' represents the road map for the project. It delineates all of the work to be performed and the results to evaluate upon project completion.