Six weeks of discovery before anyone designs anything
Your team can build. Nobody’s written down what the site is for.
You’ve got designers and developers who know their craft, or an agency you trust. But the last project ran long, the stakeholders never agreed, and the site that shipped was a compromise nobody would have chosen on purpose. Nobody’s at fault. The requirements were never written down, so everyone built toward a different picture.
Website Roadmapping is the six-week discovery phase on its own. Joe leads the research and strategy, and you come out with business requirements, user research, a site structure, and a technical blueprint that any team can build from, yours or ours.
What happens when the building starts first
Talented people solve the problem in front of them. If the problem was never defined, they solve the one they assume, and each of them assumes a different one.
So the project ends up with:
- Design rounds that don’t converge, because two stakeholders want two different sites and nothing on paper says which one you’re building
- Requirements that change mid-build, because they were discovered mid-build
- Sections that tell different stories, because different people wrote them from different assumptions
- A team that did good work on the wrong problem, and knows it
What changes in six weeks
The picture everyone’s building toward gets written down.
Joe works alongside your designers, developers, and stakeholders to produce the strategic foundation the build needs. Research and documented requirements your whole team can point to when the next argument starts.
What you’ll have when we’re done
Three documents every website project needs and most skip:
Business requirements
- What the site has to accomplish and how you’ll measure it
- Who your customers are, what they need, and how they decide
- Where you sit against the alternatives and where you can win
- What has to connect to what
UX architecture
- User stories that tie what visitors want to what you need them to do
- Direction for the home page
- Site structure and navigation for the home page and up to eight page types
- A content plan that builds trust and leads to the next step
- Where the friction is today and how to remove it
Technical blueprint
- Integration specs for the tools you already use
- Performance targets and accessibility requirements
- What has to be secure, and how
- A recommended build order, with the reasoning
- Design system direction: how visual decisions should serve the strategy
Who works on your roadmap
Joe, with your team in the room.
Joe Taylor Jr. leads the discovery
He runs the workshops, does the customer research, and writes the requirements. He holds a current Nielsen Norman Group UX Master Certification, has been building for the web since 1999, and has kept one Fortune 500 corporate site since 2012. You work with him directly for all six weeks.
Our content team
They inventory what you have, find what’s missing, and shape the content plan, so the site structure is based on what you’ll actually publish and not on a wishlist.
Your designers and developers
They’re in the working sessions from week one. The roadmap is written for them, in their terms, and they’ll know why every decision was made because they watched it get made.
The handoff
The handoff is a walkthrough. Joe takes your design and development leads through the thinking behind every decision and answers their questions until they can build without us.
Is this right for you?
For teams that can execute and need the direction written down first.
You’re a fit if
- You have designers and developers, in-house or at an agency, and you want them building from requirements instead of assumptions
- You want the requirements locked before the first mockup
- Research and competitive data change your decisions
- You’d rather spend six weeks planning than six months rebuilding
- You can give the six weeks, including your stakeholders’ time in workshops
Not a fit if
- You need the whole site designed and built (that’s Complete Website Transformation)
- You want to start with mockups and figure out the requirements later
- The decisions have already been made and research won’t change them
- You don’t have anyone to build from what we produce
Investment and timeline
Six weeks, with Joe in the room every week.
The price depends on how many stakeholders, how many integrations, and how much customer research the site needs, so the intake asks about those.
Answer the intake questions and a proposal with pricing comes back to you, online and as a PDF. No call required to see the number.
Start here
See what six weeks of discovery would cost for your site.
Get your estimate
The intake asks about your organization, your team, and what you’re trying to build. Then:
- A proposal with pricing, timeline, and deliverables comes back, online and as a PDF
- You review it on your own time, with whoever needs to see it
- If it works, book a call and we’ll set a start date
- If it doesn’t, you’ve spent a few minutes and learned what discovery costs
Where this sits among our services
Three ways to work with us. Start with the membership, add a project when something needs to be built, or put Joe on retainer when the program needs an owner.
Experience
Helpdesk
A senior web strategist on call. Monthly membership.
See Experience Helpdesk →Website
Roadmapping
Six weeks of discovery. Fixed-scope project.
Experience Strategy
Leadership
Joe embedded with your leadership team. Monthly retainer.
See Experience Strategy Leadership →While your team builds
Questions come up during the build that the roadmap didn’t anticipate. An Experience Helpdesk membership gives you a place to send them, to the person who wrote the roadmap.
Give your team the document they’ve been building without
Your designers can’t interview your customers while they’re designing. Your developers can’t write the requirements while they’re coding.
Somebody has to do that part first, and it has to be written down where everyone can see it. Six weeks with Joe gets it done, and what you get is yours to build from with any team you choose.
Ready to see the number?
Answer the intake questions. A proposal with pricing comes back to you, online and as a PDF.
Get your estimate Want the build too? See Complete Website Transformation