Planning A New Website - Part 5: Project Milestones

We believe that every good website project is just that…..a 'project'!  Put simply, it's the transition from one state to another and, as with any project, to be successful it needs good planning, communication and delivery.

Now we don’t believe that a website should be considered ‘finished’ once it’s launched!  We like to compare a new website project to that of the birth of a baby - there is the gestation period while the ‘baby’ (or in this case, the ‘website’) is built but, like a baby, once ‘born’ the website will need to be fed and nurtured. That’s another phase of the project altogether!

But for now, let’s concentrate on the build…

The business case for a website will determine a number of key goals. To meet these the project must maintain focus and this is achieved by meeting agreed ‘milestones’ during the build. Once all milestones are reached the site will be live and we’ll be well on the way to meeting the business goals.

How about an example? 

We were recently commissioned to build a website for a new Custom Installation company with a very clear business goal in mind…..“We need to find customers!”  It may seem like that could be the goal of any new website, but this one was more specific. The company was not only new, but the vast majority of staff time was being spent setting up other aspects of the business such as finding premises, legal work and building vendor relationships.

When they came to us for their website we took time to understand the type of customer they were looking for.  This provided us with their target customer’s age, likely marital status, house type and location.  Our prior knowledge of the industry helped too! 

All of these snippets of information were considered when designing the site.

Time to set milestones

Once the goals were defined we set up some key milestones for the project:

  • Agree graphic design of example pages
  • Sign-off HTML templates (including interactive elements)
  • Deliver ‘bare bones’ site (functionality working, just needing final text and images)
  • Site launch

Working back from the company launch day each milestone was given a date so that everyone working on the project knew exactly what was expected.  The result?  We launched our client's website right on time - and it delivered customer enquiries within the first two weeks!

To find out more about how we work with new website projects, why not contact us today?

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