ITG believes that time spent in the Discovery phase, learning your business model and internal systems is critical to the success of your Web site. At the close of the Discovery phase, you will be provided with a road map for your Web development project.

Step 1: Define your brand identity and business objectives:
The first things we will identify are the unique characteristics of your brand and your overarching business goals. If you have existing marketing collateral that distills this information well, it will be referenced at this phase of the process. It is critical that your Web site integrates well with the rest of your materials.

Step 2: Identify your target audience
The next step is to identify the primary users of the site and spend some time outlining their priorities and general characteristics. This data will help to hone the look and feel of the site, and begin to determine the information architecture.

Step 3: Identify the features and functionality
Documenting features and functionality, and prioritizing them, is the final step in pre-production planning.

Step 4: Review the technical environment and define development approach
Establishing site hosting environment and preferred technologies helps to determine both the programming strategy and the development timeline. Recommended

Step 5: User Validation Testing
At this stage you might want to do some cursory user testing, to reinforce the ideas brought out during Discovery. Though very early in the process, this kind of upfront sanity check may help you avoid mistakes further down the road.

Discovery Deliverables:

• Business Objectives and Brand Identity
• Outline of Unique User Types- characteristics, goals and objectives
• Prioritized Feature and Functionality List
• Overview of Technical Environment and Development Approach
• Content Matrix
• Project Plan and Budget for the rest of development

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