This month we launched our new website – the result of many months of collaboration between a talented team that included our marketing consultants, designers, video producers and developers. Working with a distributed team of external consultants on this creative project presented us with a golden opportunity to use ReviewStudio (or as they say in the software business – “eat our own dogfood”) for online proofing while developing a website. So for this month’s “Tips and Techniques” we thought we’d share the how we used ReviewStudio throughout the project for reviews and approvals.
Review 1 – Research and Creative Brief
During the first stage of the process, we collaborated on the development of a creative brief to outline our strategy, positioning, and tone. An important part of this process involved an online survey of our customers and competitors.
Team members involved in this research posted relevant web pages and elements to a single “Research” Review we created for collecting and sharing observations and opinions. (The web capture tool I liked best for this was the Nimbus add-on available for Firefox and Chrome). Team members reviewed and commented on the postings of other members and we also held a few live meetings to review and discuss the information together.
Review 2 – Wireframes and Copy
After establishing the site architecture, Wireframes were generated by the web designer for each page of the new site. The wireframes also included initial copy placement supplemented by a document containing copy development. Both the wireframes and the copy documents were posted as PDF files for review and approval using ReviewStudio.
Review 3 – Graphic Design
Once the wireframes were established, the graphic designer went to work producing the comps for each page. JPG images were posted and the related photoshop files were included in the review for the web developers to utilize in creating the final elements. The design stage of the site went through 2-4 iterations for each page, utilizing the versioning and side-by-side comparison features of ReviewStudio to manage and track the progress.
Review 4 – Video Elements
Our website contained two video elements – the homepage banner that was made up of both video footage and stock footage as well as our original marketing video that was re-edited to show some newer features. Clip selection as well as final edits and titling were all reviewed by both our marketing consultants and internal team using ReviewStudio.
Review 5 – Testing
During the implementation and testing stage of the project, we started working from the live staging site. ReviewStudio was used extensively to post screenshots of problems and bugs that arose. Our emails consistently contained the links to specific files in our “Testing” Review that highlighted a problem to fix.
Overall, using ReviewStudio worked exactly as we had hoped and expected – reducing turnaround times by providing an easy way to annotate and keeping everyone on the same page by centralizing all the communications. Having gone through this process many times in the past, the aspects I appreciated most were the simplicity of the markup process and not having to constantly dig through my emails and attachments to keep track of the work to be done.
