Every business today needs to be backed up by a professional-looking website. A growing number of businesses are choosing to bring this important work in-house and have existing project managers oversee the project. But overseeing website design requires a particular approach.
Tips for Overseeing Website Design
Below are 5 tips for overseeing website design that will produce reliable results every time.
#1. Know Your Purpose
Whether you are designing a new website from scratch or looking to revamp an existing website, it is vital that you know exactly what you are doing and why. Without a clear sense of purpose, your web development process is bound to run into difficulties. At the very least, you will be sacrificing efficiency in a vain attempt to get things done quicker.
A common mistake is to assume that defining your website’s purpose is a simple case of thinking about it for a little while and making a mental note of the answer. On the contrary, once you have to find the purpose of your website, you should then get to work putting together a design and development plan that is conscious of your conclusions.
The purpose of a business’s website will depend entirely on what that business does and how it operates. Most businesses today will offer their products or services for sale through their website, but there are some businesses such as restaurants, for example, who cannot realistically sell via their websites. For these businesses, their website is an important touchpoint between them and their customers as well as an information point that new customers can use to learn about them.
#2. Design for Your Audience, Not Your Staff
When you are deciding on the overall aesthetic and layout for your website, it is important that you are designing with your target audience in mind. Of course, you should aim to produce a website that you can be proud of. However, it should not be a website that has been designed to cater to your tastes at the expense of those of your target audience. Lots of us have experience working for businesses that we would rarely, if ever, actually patronize ourselves.
Just because you find yourself tasked with overseeing the development of a business website, that doesn’t mean that you should be aiming to produce a website for yourself. In fact, you should always be conscious of your target audience and their preferences. Putting these ahead of your own instincts is vital if you want your website to be an effective driver of traffic and new sales.
If you do not have any detailed data to work from with regards to the makeup of your target audience, it is worth investing the time and money necessary to conduct the appropriate market research. The better you understand your target audience, the easier it will be for you to design a website that appeals to them.
#3. Devise a Consistent Workflow
Whenever you are overseeing any business project, it always pays to have a predefined workflow to follow. If you are working with a web design team for the first time, then you will need to establish a new approach the constructing a workflow.
One of the best systems out there for optimizing workflow is the Kanban system. Using the Kanban system, you can break up larger tasks into smaller and more easily achievable goals. Once you have done this, a Kanban board enables you to track exactly what needs to be done, what tasks are currently a priority, and which tasks have been completed. This article on how to track progress in Kanban from Kanbanize explains in more detail exactly how Kanban enables you to track progress. Kanbanize also offers digital Kanban software that not only includes a digital Kanban board but also contains a suite of collaborative tools that set it apart from the competition.
#4. Be Willing to Outsource for Better Results
If there are certain features such as web apps that you think would be perfect for your business website but you have no idea how to implement yourself, do not be afraid to outsource the tasks. By outsourcing key tasks to external developers, you can take advantage of skills and expertise beyond what is immediately available to you.
Consider the long-term benefits of having a top-quality website and you will realize that they easily outweigh the costs of hiring web developers to add features to your site.
#5. Be Realistic in Your Budgeting
In addition to proper planning, every task in business requires proper budgeting. Without knowing exactly what kind of money and resources you have to work with, it is pretty much impossible to formulate any detailed plans on how to proceed. Web design is no exception to this rule. You will want to know exactly what you have to work with before you begin.
But simply throwing together a budget is not going to help you. You need to put together a budget that is realistic both in terms of how much you are expecting to spend, and how much you are expecting to have available.
Overseeing website design is like overseeing any business project – it requires a considered approach. The tips above will enable you to guide the development of a website for any business and ensure it is completed on time and on budget.