Planning for success

If you are building a new website, significantly changing your old website or just adding new functionality then good planning should be where you start. The trouble is that a lot of the time the people in charge of making changes or those that come up with the next great idea are ‘big picture’ people. Visionaries (if you ask them) or Trouble makers (if you ask the staff).

In a competitive online space new ideas and new functionality have to happen fast – before someone else (your competitors) get there first. This can lead to a job cycle of ‘idea – design – code – launch’. It leaves out planning, risk analysis, testing, variance and contingency.

If you speak to a builder (most likely an older tradie or one of those guys that actually still wears a tool belt) you’ll hear things like ‘measure twice, cut once’. It is great advice for almost anything. If you make sure you are doing the right thing then there is less chance you will completely stuff it up – costing you money, material and time. A solid house that can survive the odd storm is better than a fancy house that falls down as soon as it gets a little gusty. It is the same for a website. Build it too fast and you risk missing opportunities, missing your audience, making mistakes and blowing your budget. Being first to market is important but useless if your site falls over as soon as it becomes popular. 

Things to think about

1. Business goals and objectives
2. Project risks
3. Technology
4. Hosting, servers and environment
5. Use case scenarios
6. Prototypes and annotations
7. User testing
8. A functional specification (for your developers)
9. A technical specification (if it heavily technology reliant)
10. Building a positive user experience
11. Brand implications (especially if you have an existing brand)
12. Technical support (if it breaks)
13. What happens next… a good web project never ends, it just gets better.