How To Complete A Successful Website Development Project
Overview
According to our detailed records that date back to when the business started in January 1991, we have had 191 different clients! Some of those clients purchased CD-ROM products from us in the 90’s when we were an educational publisher. But once we sold our product line to McGraw-Hill in 1997, every client since has hired us to create a custom, digital application. We created a few more CD-ROM products back in the distant past, and more recently we have designed dozens of touchscreen interactives, as well as augmented reality apps, but the vast majority of clients hired us to create or redesign a website.
Many of our clients have worked with us consistently, dating back as far as 2002 when we started our first project with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). Of course, we have brought in many new clients each year as well. Our business growth has been the result of returning clients who work with us over several years and even decades. It’s great to develop these lasting relationships and has been gratifying to our staff, who look forward to new projects with people they know and respect.
Those of you who have worked with us know you can expect your interactions to be very professional but also friendly, engaging, and open. We enjoy our work and really appreciate our clients whether they are new or have been around for a long time. We’ve been in business for over thirty years so we have a good understanding of how to make projects work on both sides of the table. Recently, however, a new client asked our advice on how to put together a team from various departments at their museum to work on their website redesign project. Each member of the team would have future responsibilities keeping the website content up to date and their departments had a stake in how the website would function in order to achieve their specific goals. This question was asked by someone at the very top of the management hierarchy, "Can you describe the skill sets you are assuming our "website team" would require?"
This was a good question for us to hear at the beginning of a project because it reflected an understanding of the potential for problems by assigning the wrong people to the client’s “website team.” Our response was that it’s hard to identify specific skills that are needed on the client side. Rather than skills, the most successful teams we’ve worked with, as a group, shared the following traits:
- Detail-oriented – The website is a vast collection of details that must be accurate, placed in the correct location, and important to the users who are trying to understand the content. We can provide the structure to make the navigation intuitive and create the visual design and programming to support the goals of the project. However, the details contained on each page and revealed through each user interaction will be based on decisions made by the client’s website team. We will manage the process and dig deep into understanding the content but our clients must be able to make decisions about how they want to see it organized and displayed.
- Timely – The process we use to redesign a website follows a series of steps that are explained in our proposal. The process is fairly linear and requires decisions and input from the client’s website team in order to continue to the next step. Though there are opportunities to revisit decisions at certain points in the process without affecting the schedule, most of the input from our clients will need to be timely and support their goals for this project.
- Committed – Every project represents a significant expenditure of resources by the client and will take months to complete. We typically meet on a video call once a week with our clients for the majority of the project duration. Those calls are designed to keep the project moving forward and require a commitment by the IK team and the client’s team to be prepared to give opinions and make decisions. As the project progresses, it’s extremely helpful to have the same team members who participated in the planning and design process still involved in the final testing and evaluation stage.
- Enthusiastic – While we know that there are always some down cycles when team members are tired or distracted with other responsibilities, we have seen that a positive level of enthusiasm goes a long way to make the site great. We will do our best to be easy to work with and to keep our sense of humor throughout the project. Our most successful projects occur when our clients can see the value that comes from their efforts and have a store of positive energy available when things start to get tedious.
While this list is hardly exhaustive, it’s a sufficient start toward imagining who will make good team members on a website design and development project. We see these traits in our staff of professionals at Interactive Knowledge. And our experience has shown that our favorite clients share these positive traits as well.