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Running a web project efficiently
Creating or redoing a web site can be great for business – but it comes with a lot of challenges, too. There are many components to manage and multiple, sometimes-conflicting priorities to balance. The staff of Web Design/E-commerce Guide has been through many web projects, though, and we're here to help.
Set up the core team
First, if you haven't started working on it yet, you'll soon discover one of the biggest challenges of creating a web site for your business is that everybody thinks they can help. The VP of sales will tell you what colors work best, the warehouse manager will make font recommendations, and on and on.
The best approach is to create a small team of people from different departments who will help choose the designers and provide input and feedback. At a minimum, get one person from marketing and/or sales, one product or service manager (someone who focuses on your primary business), and one technical person if you have any in-house IT staff.
That team should be the only ones who provide feedback on the design while it's in progress. Don't share drafts or mockups with larger crowds and you'll save yourself some big headaches. You'll probably need to show a 'final draft' to a larger audience, including some executives, and of course there's still an opportunity for tweaking. But cutting down on the number of people involved in every decision will make everything run more smoothly.
Plan the site completely
The most important part of your web site is the content and functionality: what it says and what it does. You should decide what you need out of your site before choosing a vendor: the best web site projects we see are those that are well thought out before the client talks to designers or agencies.
You certainly don't have to have every word written or every button planned out. Here are some of the things to decide.
- What major sections will the site include? What pages in each one?
- Will you sell products through your web site or not? (See our E-commerce page.)
- Will the site collect information from visitors?
- Do you want to have an email newsletter to go along with your site?
- How are you going to advertise your site?
- Does the site need to connect to any existing databases? (For example, letting current customers look up their accounts.)
Who will maintain it?
Before deciding who'll build your site, you should consider who is going to maintain it. Whether your site needs updates daily or only a few times a year, an ongoing maintenance plan is important.
Once a site is created, it doesn't take much technical skill to make simple edits to text or images. Many businesses choose to look internally for someone who handle very basic maintenance. If you don't have someone on staff who can take it on, many web design companies have maintenance packages they'll sell you. For a small monthly fee, you get a certain amount of edits made.
More complex edits, such as adding the navigation tools or the design, require more of an understanding of the workings of the site. For those types of changes, you'll probably want to go back to the developers who created the site in the first place.