Focus Your Web Project

Focusing your web project

Have you just been told to sort out the company web strategy? Before you jump in and start building, prototyping or designing, we suggest you stop, take a deep breath and think about the different ingredients of your website. The aim of this brief is to provide a set of tools to help you identify key issues at the planning stage.

You need to concentrate your thinking on issues, such as customers’ needs, type and style of content; your company staff and organisation and other stakeholders. Later on, you will need to manage and consider firmer areas of the project and its management, such as requirement specifications, test plans, and installation schedules.

Once you’ve started to organise yourself by these individual areas the overriding aim and objectives of your web site will have much more clarity.

An Example

Suppose you are working for an existing retail business that sells DVDs. The company has decided that they can no longer ignore the Internet, so is going to create an e-commerce site with the ability for users to add reviews to the DVD details, and to chat about related subjects on a forum you will be providing on the site.

Use a diagram similar to the one below:

Each web site will be different but the diagram serves as an example.

In the planning stage you can see that apart from the technology required (this company did not plan to change its technology) and the staff considerations (which are critical, but are addressed later), all the rest of the ‘ingredients’ are vital and should be monitored constantly. You can buy a new oven, and decide which jam to put in the middle, but without the basic ingredients you aren’t going to get a cake at all!

So in our fictional example we have to consider the effect of selling DVDs over the Internet on our existing business, what we think our customers will want, the content (images, details of products, reviews etc) and the stakeholders – which include in this case everyone in your company, the customers, the investors, potential advertisers etc.

We can come back to this diagram later, but it is obvious at a glance that the most ‘red’ areas are in the planning stage.

Objectives, Needs and Wants

The first question is:

“What is the site for and what business benefit will I get from it?”

Once you are clear in your mind exactly what you want to achieve from the website, the individual requirements and functions are much more easily identified.

For instance is it an electronic brochure, a multimedia newspaper or an online shop? Each product has different requirements and interactions both internally and externally.

For example, an online shop may be competing (largely on price) with many other outlets. Just think about the following:

• Are you prepared to be the cheapest? If not, then what added-value are you providing to persuade people to buy from you?
• Will you be taking custom away from your own retail site?
Do you have enough stock capability – people buying from online sources are very intolerant of delays!
• Will an electronic brochure render some of your other marketing effort redundant?
• Is there enough news to regularly update an online news-based site? After all, how many times do you reread last months newspapers? Without fresh content your site will be dead in the water after a month.

This is a good example of how the objectives of a web project effect the business as a whole.

The Target Audience

At this point you will need to start to consider your target audience. A B2B site will have an entirely different look, feel and content from a B2C site. There are many ways you can segment your target audience, (Eg: new customers/ existing customers, by their market; by location; by size etc).

When you’re identifying your segments remember they should be: Measurable, Accessible, Sustainable and Substantial.

Rank each of these – and cater largely for the most important group. One way of ranking target customers is to plot their needs against your ability to fulfil those needs. The customer group that your site will fulfil the best will be the key target audience.

Taking our online DVD seller example, we have broken down our target audience by age, and added a special ‘collector’ category. You can of course segment your audience in any one of a huge number of ways, and in fact might want to divide it in several different ways for the same project. This will give you a comprehensive overview of your target audience.

Looking at the matrix above, it can be seen that our different market segments have quite different priorities. For example, children don’t care about e-commerce, have little interest in foreign films and need simple navigation. On the other hand a collector will certainly want the site to be e-commerce enabled, might will be interested in foreign releases and wants advanced navigation and search facilities to find specific items. This might well indicate that for the best market penetration you could consider a series of micro sites or themed zones, one for each segment.

Technology

A lot of people are frightened by technology. Surprisingly, it is not always as important to a project as is thought. Sometimes the technology is prescriptive, such that the all of the individual technologies are fixed.

Let experts (either internal or external) decide upon the required technology, but don’t be afraid to challenge, and get a second opinion if you feel uncomfortable.

Don’t forget your target audience at this stage. An intranet site used by 25 staff will have very different requirements to an e-commerce site used by hundreds of thousands of consumers all over the world. A multimedia site aimed at computer-literate consumers might well include Flash content – a business-oriented site aimed at corporate clients probably wouldn’t.

Ensure that the email address on the site is being redirected to someone within your organisation who has the time and expertise to deal with it – and that the email address from which you send the reply matches the corporate address. No Hotmail accounts please!

Project Staff & Stakeholders

It is vital to have a project leader who will coordinate the web site design and build. Once identified, ask whether they have the time and support to do the job effectively.

The Project Manager will need to identify the key stakeholders involved with the web site, and get them involved early in the process. Not only will they provide invaluable input during the creation phase, they are also much more likely to buy in to the site if they have been involved in creating it!

A useful way of thinking about stakeholders is to consider their interest in your project and the control they have over it. A marketing director, funding a new web portal to showcase a portfolio, is clearly going to be highly interested and able to exert a great deal of control over the project, and will have to be managed as such. You can use the matrix below to help manage your stakeholders.

If you remember, earlier on we identified our stakeholders as people within our own company (some more important than others!), customers/users, investors and potential advertisers. There may well be more, but let’s stick with those for now! We can plot the relative importance of these stakeholders or groups of stakeholders on the matrix, with the size of the circle representing the size of the group.

We can now clearly see the largest stakeholder groups, their interest in the project and their relative power, so we can decide how much time to spend with each group and how to manage each group.

Creating the web site is not the end of the process, it is the beginning, and stakeholders will need to continue to be managed.

To do so, as well as keeping the key stakeholders involved, you will need to assign staff to look after relevant areas and keep them up to date. Be sure to factor this in when creating the site. Not only will there be a cost associated with such activity but there will be a drain on the time of each member of staff involved.

Managing Content

Content is the reason people will return repeatedly to your website. They might love the design, find the navigation completely intuitive and love your corporate style, but if the content is inaccurate, out-of-date or dull they simply won’t come back.

Make content accurate and continually refreshed. You might also consider hosting some sort of forum or other user community on your site. There are pros and cons to any sort of user involvement on your site of course. Your site will be vibrant and lively but may need the guiding hand of a moderator to ensure all runs smoothly.

Might users be looking for jobs? If so, put vacancies on the site – this gives them a reason to come back. Another way to provide ‘stickability’ is to provide useful downloads on a periodic basis – this also gives you a reason to contact your user base to inform them that such items are available. You could include a Content Management System to allow non-technical staff to update and create information on their own areas of the site.

You also need to consider how much support you will need on an ongoing basis from the company or department that created the site. Some items such as photographs or copy might need specialists to ensure quality.

Design

Of course design is subjective, but there are some pointers to help.

• Make sure that the site conforms to your corporate design standards.
• Is the logo used correctly?
• Are the colours right?
• Ensure the ‘tone of voice’ used is consistent.

Examine your existing marketing material – make sure that the web site and the marketing material look as if they come from the same source – corporate image is not something to confuse – and if they don’t, you either need to select another design for the site or get some new marketing collateral created.

Look at other web sites in your own industry and see if a standard has been adopted – is the navigation always on the left? Is the telephone number always at the top right-hand side of the page? Decide if it is important to you to follow these conventions – which might well give users a certain ‘comfort factor’ – or would you rather be seen as radical and different, even if you lose a few customers because they find the site confusing?

Web design is like newspaper design, users have started getting used to navigating in certain ways and it is foolish to go against these conventions. For instance if a newpaper had commentary at the front, news in the middle and classifieds at the back this would feel like a very odd read. The same is true of web sites and it is not advisable to go away from the conventional design used within your market place because this is what you audience will be used to.

Minimising cost and time overruns during the build stage

The more time spent on planning and scoping the project the less chance there is for cost overruns and changes. Where possible try and create a strong design brief and technical brief that has covered all your requirements. Changes to specification and design once the project has started will create unnecessary complications and additional cost.

Due to the flexibility of the web it is always tempting to keep adding more functionality as people come up with new ideas – avoid letting these creep into the project where possible.

A web site is like rebuilding a house – any small changes requested during the build stage always end up with time overruns and increases in costs which lead to fall out all round

Measuring and promoting success

So now you have your shiny new web site up and running. It looks great and works smoothly. All your staff know their roles. You make it live and … well what next?

The answer is not much, unless …… two things happen.

Firstly, you will need to promote your site. The web address needs to be on your other materials – letterheads, brochures, emails, business cards etc. Consider the cost of these changes to your business when planning the site. You might well need to pay for some sponsored online advertising such as Google Adwords – those classified type ads that pop up on the right hand side of the screen when you do a Google Search.

If the company creating your site has done their job properly, your site should also appear in the list of sites (the left hand side of a Google search results page) when a user looks for your site. This is called ‘natural search’ and is optimised in the construction of your web pages. Ask your web design company about this before you hire them – they will probably call it Search Engine Optimisation and try to charge you a fortune!

Secondly, you will need to measure how well it is actually performing. This can be done in several ways. You can use a unique non-geographic telephone number to analyse the phone calls the site is generating. You can use web based software to see how many times your web pages are being accessed. You can count the number of emails or other form based enquiries are being sent through from the site.

Reviewing our original analysis, we can see that the final monitoring and maintenance phase requires that most aspects of the site are kept under review and that the content should be constantly updated and kept fresh.

If there aren’t enough enquiries of whatever sort then consider advertising the site. If you are spending a fortune on advertising, your site is well ranked by the search engines and your marketing material has the web address plastered all over it, then you need to reassess your strategy completely. That is of course the situation we all want to avoid and why Mediahawk have prepared the ‘Website Preparation Checklist’ upon which this article is based. If you would like a copy of the checklist to use when considering web design and development, please contact us. We do offer a web design and development service ourselves and would be pleased to discuss any aspect of this article further, either over the phone or in person.

Contact details

info@mediahawk.co.uk

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