Project: ISR online service
Thank you for requesting a proposal from Siegel Vision for the Development of the ISR online service. We are excited at the prospect o f bringing online grocery service into the San Francisco Bay area and hope to forge a relationship that will help this project be succ essful from the start and grow beyond the Bay area.
This is not a complete proposal or a quote, but rather a sketch of what we can do. We hope it will prove to be useful. Our qui ckly estimated total proposed fee for the development of the ISR service through a launch is in the range of $260,000. Problem Definition ISR is in the unique position of being the first to offer an online grocery market place and delivery service to one of the world's mo st computer-literate markets. The existence of comparable services in other locations (NYCGrocer.com in New York and HomeGrocer.com in Seattle) gives us a chance to learn from other companies' successes and mistakes. The next battle will be won with flawless execution and a next-generation user experience. Excellent branding and marketing tactics can certainly help customers become familiar with your name and get them to your fron t door, but what keeps them coming back? Customer loyalty comes not just from having low prices or a great selection, but from the eas e of use and reliability of a service. Loyalty comes when a site gains customer confidence. Loyalty comes when sites actually save peo ple time and energy, and simplify their lives. In the end, it is these criteria that drive the bottom line. Meeting these objectives i s what goes into making a successful site.
Creating successful Web sites is what Siegel Vision is all about. Founded by David Siegel, author of the hugely popular "Creating Killer Web Sites", and Chairman of Studio Verso, the award winning Int ernet strategy and design firm, Siegel Vision leverages years of experience in Web site strategy, production, design and e-commerce de velopment to bring the highest quality results. We at Siegel Vision are confident in our abilities to bring a tested, fully functional , attractive Web site to a successful launch. Thank you again for taking the time to consider our proposal. We look forward to meeting with you soon. The Team Working closely with ISR is our number one objective. More projects fail because of communication problems than anything else. Our off ice is located in the heart of San Francisco's Multimedia Gultch, We are a fully operational development firm consisting of some of th e information revolution's best architects and specialists. David Siegel has played a key role in the evolution of design on the web and has been a recognized expert in developing Web st rategies. Author of two highly successful books of insight into Web site development, Siegel brings award winning experience from year s of lecturing, consulting, and strategic development to the founding of Siegel Vision. David has worked closely with clients such as Hewlett Packard, Lucent, Sony, Office Depot, Amazon.com, Stock Center, Navitel, and others. He is a strategic advisor to the W3C and a n international lecturer on ecommerce strategy and tactics. After receiving his master's degree in digital typography from Stanford Un iversity in 1985, David worked at Pixar for one year before going into business for himself. His site is at www.siegelvision.com John (Bagus) Haig is one of the Internet's most experienced Web site producers. Having launched over 25 high-profile Web site s as Organic Online's Senior Web Producer and as a freelance producer, Bagus has the in-the-trenches experience to keep large projects on track. His communication skills have given him a very high success rate in a field where most contractors and clients end up not w anting to work together again. His maturity and experience with database-driven web sites assure that things will go smoothly and prof essionally. Bagus spent over three years at Organic Online, one of the Internet's largest and oldest Web development agencies. He was the company's third employee and Senior Producer. He has extensive experience in developing Web sites for high profile fortune 500 compani es as well as start up ventures. Among his client list are sites such as McDonald's, Levi's, Kinkos, Intelihealth, Preview Vacations, Red Orb Entertainment, and Ad Age magazine. He now is a freelance Web consultant and developer and recently launched sites for Roger D ean and Proxinet. Before moving to Organic, Bagus worked for 7 years in the Biological sciences as a field project leader, researcher, statistic ian and scientific author with the National Biological Survey, the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the University of W isconsin, where he received a B.S. in the History of Science. His full resume is online at www.cyborganic.net/people/bagus/resume.html Jennifer Petersen has worked on a variety of Web projects including Excite, @Home, MSNBC, Broderbund, and C|Net's download.com . Her QuickTour project with the @Home Network has given her first hand experience with the design and integration of the latest in We b technology. She has worked with designers and also independently, producing sites for smaller online businesses. Her corporate projects are profiled at www.workhouse.com/websites/resume and include sites such as www.lastexpress.com/ (desig ner & producer in association with atomicvision.com), www.bonelli.com (designer & producer), www.streetnet.com (assistant designer & p roducer), and www.getsmartinc.com Lorena Proia is an accomplished user-interface specialist. She will work on the forms and buying process specifically. She wil l work with a usability firm to validate and improve the buying model and with the Siegel Vision staff to realize the screens necessar y. See her site: www.proia.com Strategy ISR has done a great deal of strategizing about their business model and development. Siegel Vision would like to be your partner in a chieving these goals. The customer is at the heart of everything we do. We've seen a lot of sites launch with a content-centric model. We don't believe this is the right approach. Successful sites of the future will be built around customers, not content. Your partnership with Siegel Vision means that some of the Internet's top strategists are working for you to create the scalab le, fast, and dependable Web site you need. We will create the graphic design, help organize your content for smooth transition into y our database driven system, and develop navigational elements and templates for all database, customization and personalization featur es. We'll test and verify all decisions with real customers before launch. We'll strategize with you to ensure a smooth transition fro m an initial launch to ongoing updates and revisions. We'll develop systems to help you monitor the real success of your site. We'd like to introduce you now to our vision of how we would forge a working partnership to best achieve this end. By followin g this formalized process together, all production and communication issues will be addressed and a successful project will be assured . Conceptual Overview The ISR online grocery service must appeal to people and engage them in a relationship that will last. Ultimately, the customers will tell you how to please them, so the site must support a dialogue between customers and the company. At the outset, we'll define what a successful site means to ISR and develop automated ways to test and report the parameters t hat will give you the information you need. We'll develop realistic user scenarios to ground our development of how the site will actu ally be used, and we'll conduct Internet Safaris to find out what is already successful. With Siegel Vision Workshops, we'll identify what content is needed and how to best organize it. We'll develop several mockups and test our ideas with real customers using both in formal focus groups and formal testing methodologies. We'll find out well before launch what doesn't work and what people don't like. We'll find out why and what they would like instead. Finally, we'll define clear and precise specifications for the construction of t he site, produce all the templates and graphics, and work with you to integrate this into your database and commerce systems to comple te a Beta site. After more testing, QA, and staging, your site will undoubtedly be ready to go. By the time your site launches, we'll be ready to implement a version 1.1 plan for putting in place pieces that weren't able t o go live with their initial launch. We'll then begin planning for a full version 2.0. Process With a letter of agreement in place, Siegel Vision would drive the process through a series of 10 stages. These stages will allow us t o go forwards with out having to go back. We've packed extensive strategy, design iterations and viability testing into the early stag es of this project to assure that the production tasks done later won't have to be redone due to lack of planning and testing. What fo llows is a listing of the 10 stages, short summaries explaining their function, and an overview of the time and personnel Siegel Visio n plans to dedicate during each of the phases.