5 Things To Do Before You Kickoff a Website Redevelopment Project
1. Start Your Research Before You Need To
Any marketer knows website projects are no easy task. To me, at the start it can feel like you’re about to make the best site in the world. Yet given today’s atmosphere, by the end of the project you might already feel behind the times. It’s amazing how fast website trends and best practices move.
It’s likely that when you kickoff a website project, it’ll be the most time you’ve spent focusing on your website. You’ll learn a bunch of new best practices, be inspired by things you see online, and come up with new ways you want to do things. So there’ll you’ll be, full of new ideas as the project develops, but constricted in your ability to add features once a project kicks off.
If you know a website redevelopment is in your future, take time now to research and prepare. You’ll be much more satisfied with the scope of the project and there’ll be less surprises along the way.
Takeaway: If you anticipate a web development project in your future, dive into research NOW.
2. Review A Lot Of Vendors
Even in my small community, many vendors still specialized in different ways. Some were full-scale agency, some wanted to focus on GDPR, others didn't have developers in house, some had a full website-focused crew, others are dev-heavy. Turns out, not all are equal in their offerings, pricing, or deliverables.
What does your business need? What can your team handle in house? Does your pitch to the vendor jive with how they work? If you take time ot evaluate your needs first, then you’ll have better conversations when evaluating vendors. If we felt a vendor was specializing in content development, but we could handle that in-house, we knew it wouldn’t be a fit.
After reviewing our list of vendors, we were surprised to find that ones we thought would be perfect fits were the exact opposite. We were thankful we picked a mix of vendors to review. It made it easier to find the perfect fit for our project.
Takeaway: Build a “Must Have, Would Be Nice” list and use it to share with vendors to guide your conversation.
3. Determine Your Priority User And Build The New Site For Them
Websites serve many purposes: sales, recruiting, documentation, contact, research, PR, education, etc. If you don’t have a clear focus on who your primary user is (or want it to be) then you’ll build just another old un-focused website. Before you head to vendor meetings, get really specific of who your target audience is.
When we did our project, we defined three key stakeholders. The primary stakeholder we used as our guiding light to everything we built. The secondary was similar to the primary, but at a different price point. We didn’t focus our site development on that user, but knew we also wanted to track their activity within the site. Third was recruiting, to drive how we built all career content and attracted new hires.
Takeaway: Define the primary customer user and a primary applicant user before project launch.
4. Get Real Specific About Your Scope
“Create an easy-to-use website” is not a good scope. When you work with your web vendor, as soon as you sing off on the contract to start the project all requests are locked in. You’ll get used to hearing “that will be additional development time” for things you look to add or adjust throughout the dev part of the project.
For example, in our recent project, we wanted a form change from an on-page form to a pop up form. Even though we had this functionality built elsewhere in the site, our vendor still required additional dev time. It’s proof that you’ll need to be specific when you first request functionality on your site.
Takeaway: Document a specific scope and share it with your web vendor early so your expectations are aligned.
5. Be Prepared To Maintain Your End Of The Contract
It’s all well and good to say you want the site done in three months, but can you withhold your end of the bargain? Don’t forget that working on the website is additional work to your day-to-day. This project is demanding and time intensive. And…it’s not just your time! You will need subject-matter experts others to test and submit feedback or approval on the site.
All of this should be taken into consideration when planning for the website. Vacations and travel are also critical to consider for anyone involved in the project, as well as holidays.
With our project, we anticipated a launch that was then delayed three weeks due to vacation and a holidays. It wasn’t a critical launch date for us, but knowing up front that those unexpected contradictions exist will help you set a realistic time line with your vendor.
Takeaway: Verify that your team has availability at the stages of the project where they’re needed.
Bonus: Start An Ideas Log
If you’re a creative like me, while you’re executing this project you’re going to think of a lot of new ways to use the site that you never considered before. Start yourself a log of all the things you think of and suggestions your team might give you outside of the current scope of the project. Those are all great ideas to dive into post-launch as new projects…but are likely not critical enough to delay your launch. If they do, I’d bet you’d never launch!
For a marketer, launching new websites is fun! It’s a chance to wrap up your branding, products, and services into a single beautiful exhibit of your company. It’s one of the biggest examples of the talent in your marketing department — be proud of your new site and keep those ideas flowing of how to continue to make the most of it!
See our new site, here!
