Good planning is a halfway to success. This is especially true in website design and redesign. In this article we will discuss the typical process of website design projects. Review the important components involved in launching a website. Also we will discuss some common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Typical Life Cycle of Website Design Projects
- Discovery session
- Identify site audience
- Determine website goals
- Define success factors
- Scoping and budget
- Plan project scope and identify key functionality
- Figure out budget and time line
- Allocate resources
- Implementation
- Content
- Graphic design ( images, fonts, color and layout)
- User experience design (navigation, workflow and accessibility)
- Development
- Content input
- Test and Launch
Discovery session – Audience
The first (and the most important) step is to know your audience.
It worth a quiet hour to sit down with pencil and paper, and answer the following questions:
- What are they like
- Why are they here
- What keeps them up at night
- How can you solve their problem
- What do you want them to do
- How might they resist
- How can you best reach them
These questions were quoted from Book “Slide:ology” by Nancy Duarte. These questions were originally intended for creating great presentations but fit for websites perfectly. Check out this page then click on the number 15 in the first grid to read more details.
A few examples:
- Prospect customers who want to check you out for credibility before they buy
- Existing customers who need product/service support
- Employees who need to learn about company products/services
- General public who might become a fan or customer of yours
Once you know your audience, you can define the goals of your website and figure out success factors. Success factors should be tangible parameters that you can measure. For example, “We like to have 300 whitepaper downloads within the first month of new site launch.” Of course, there will be guess factors but having a tangible goal can help you reach it faster. You can always measure and adjust.
Scoping and Budget
“Buy it cheap, buy it twice.”
You want to work within budget but it’s important to be realistic and reasonable about your expectation – so you can actually get what you are promised with good quality..
Assuming that you made a good decision on selecting right vendors, quality times scope of your website should be proportional to your investment.
When you have a fixed budget to work with, you want to fit the right amount of feature requests in. You can consider doing the project in phases. This approach also allows you to test the market and learn then adjust.
When you have flexible (or even unlimited) budget, you might still want to be conservative on the scope to make sure things are manageable. From our experience, a typical business website should be launched within 6 months. Complex online application type of websites can take longer but should not exceed 12 months. With web technology evolving so fast, time to market is a crucial factor for project success. Again, you can launch and learn then adjust and re-launch. But you should not sit on a project for too long, even with good intention of making it perfect.
To be continued – Stay tuned for the next section of this article where we will continue on to discuss the next step in the website design life cycle – implementation.