Anyone can make a website. Website builders like Squarespace and Wix have made it cheaper and easier than ever to launch a beautiful, scrolling website in under an hour.
All of this has created an expectation that websites are easy. And it is easy - depending on who you are. It’s easy if you’re a personal trainer and you need a website to promote your services. It’s easy if you’re a software start-up promoting a mobile app that gets delivered in the Apple Store or Google Play. There are standard plug-and-play templates that you can rebrand with your own logo and colours (and fonts if you’re a designer-type), and they’ll do the job perfectly.
The websites that are difficult to redesign, and have always been difficult to redesign, are the ones that represent the interests of a variety of people across large organisations. These websites need to achieve a swathe of goals and satisfy the needs of many stakeholders. These websites come with legacy databases that need to be migrated and managed. They house archives of content - some of which is useful, but most of which is irrelevant and out-of-date.
If this is the situation you’re facing, then your website will take longer than a day to launch. With all the innovations in web design technology we have today, there is no out-of-the-box solution that will do the website strategy for you. (Not yet, anyway.)
Here are the most common problems we see companies face when they rush a website redesign without a strategy:
- Wasted time and money because the new website doesn’t adequately address the company’s needs, and all kinds of patchwork fixes are made after launch to try to save it
- Realising too late that your web design agency built the website on a CMS that is slow, clunky and inflexible, making the new website as painful to maintain as the old one
- Choosing a web design agency based on the cheapest price, rather than the best capabilities and fit for what your organisation needs, making it redundant soon after it goes live.
You can avoid these pitfalls by creating a robust strategy that has been fed into from people across the organisation.
1. Collaboration is key
In order to fully understand what your website needs to achieve, you need to identify and involve stakeholders from across your organisation. By canvassing their experiences, understanding their work, and involving them in the process, you’ll be able to determine the true nature of the problems to be solved, and identify more creative and long-lasting solutions.
This requires carving out some dedicated time from BAU to gather the information and align your stakeholders from across the organisation. Together, you can establish a clear guiding strategy that allows decisions to be made quickly and deliver the results you’re really driving for.
For tips on setting up a collaborative environment that eliminates ego from the process, check out our three ways to improve structured thinking in your organisation.
2. Understand who you’re solving problems for
Who is your website really for? Who are your users? How can you keep them at the centre? Your strategy should be informed by researching your users - using both quantitative and qualitative approaches such as creating surveys, insight interviews, analysing existing data, etc.
Understanding your users helps clarify what steps you need to take, and informs how you want to prioritise your approach.
Make sure you’re eliminating confirmation bias from your research to get the real gold from your users.
3. Take time to nut out your business objectives
Once you’ve got the right people in the room, and have a clear understanding of your users, you should have the right ingredients to determine your business objectives.
How does the proposed website fit with your organisational strategy? What does this website have to be able to do in order to deliver value to your users? What priority can you assign to each of these objectives?
4. Determine what really matters
Now that you have your business objectives, it’s time to look at the principles for procuring the right website for your needs. What are the must-haves? Where is the wriggle room?
There are lots of decisions to be made, and there are implications for each one. You need to make sure that these implications are clearly communicated so you can make the decisions that best fit your organisation and the context you work within. Some of the basics are:
- What’s the timeframe?
Do we have time to ‘do it once, do it right’ and go deep on research? Or do we need to move quickly and deliver now, and fix later?
Shorter timeframes can mean choosing between quality or MVP (minimum viable product), or paying more to increase the level of resource to meet the deadline. If you don’t have extra budget, you’ll need to accept there will be patch fixes after ‘go live’. - What’s more important - price, or quality?
Where do you want to see the best bang for buck? Design? User experience?
Each organisation can develop procurement principles that echo their values and strategy. The parameters for what your website needs to achieve become clearer as you work through the decisions. This will help clarify what deliverables are being prioritised, and what the impact on the website will be.
When you’re staring down the barrel of a new website project, get off on the right foot and address these fundamentals to lead digital change in your organisation.
Once you’ve got the fundamentals sorted, then you can start thinking about visual design and technology. The internet doesn’t need more websites, it needs better websites.
