One of the most important steps of any website’s design and development is the website project plan. As daunting as it may seem, creating one will guide the process, keep you on budget, identify areas of opportunity, and enable you to prepare in advance for potential delays. Follow these four key components to organize a potentially daunting project in a way that makes sure you don’t lose sight of your goals.
Create a Website Roadmap
Use the planning and discovery phase of your website project to define your goals and expectation. This will help you control project flow and ensure that all tasks address your needs appropriately. During this step, you’ll want to focus on these main areas: Company business goals, the website’s role in achieving business goals, your customers’ needs, existing and needed technology components and budget.
Developing a roadmap will help your development company and you have a transparent conversation about progress, needs and, more importantly, staying on budget while reducing surprise expenditures.
Design that fits your customers
Your website is your business’ digital footprint. It’s how and where potential customers determine if they want to purchase your goods, contract your services or partner with you. While a website can be developed to do all those things well, if done incorrectly it can create a confusing or overwhelming traffic flow. An experienced website development agency like Bayshore Solutions will create a focused, efficient, and responsive design that engages your customers and increases your revenue. They’ll do this through UX and UI design.
UX, or user experience, focuses on the customer’s experience and how they can easily navigate through the website to their desired destination using the site’s visual and intuitive cues. UI, or user interface, focuses on those cues and how the site is laid out, making sure that the site communicates the path that UX designers have developed.
By understanding your customers’ needs, problems and interests, you’ll be able to effectively design a site that looks great, answers client questions and rivals (or exceeds) your competitors’ sites.
Measuring impact and engagement
Website development includes tools that will help you see real-time interaction, trends, and help you plan for the future. You’ll also be able to test different digital marketing techniques and identify which are most effective.
As you work to develop your website project plan, it’s wise to take into consideration social media or inbound marketing tools such as HubSpot, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics that you’ll want connected to your website. With these, you’ll be able to track user interactions and improve your marketing ROI.
Learn from user interactions
Once you have a website and the tools to closely examine the customer and their buyer’s journey, you can work on developing a website strategy that allows you to adjust the brand experience to better fit your business goals. User interaction data will help you create buyer personas to grow the relationship between your brand and potential customers. Fun fact: Research shows that 70% of customers expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. In fact, it’s estimated that by 2020, chatbots will manage 85% of customer interaction with a company.
Long-term planning and project layouts that include these four crucial elements ensure that your company’s website launch goes smoothly. Don’t let your website get sidetracked by ideas that might seem attractive in the moment but may not positively impact your business goals. Reduce delays and budgetary changes with a thorough website project plan.
Kevin Hourigan is the President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions and for over 23 years, his company has provided clients with digital solutions that grow their businesses. To contact Kevin, please email [email protected].
