Website redesign projects don’t have to be a major undertaking, a well organized project with a skilled project manager will plan and implement the project to a well thought out schedule, with the responsibilities to ensure that the project is on time and on budget. Maintaining a full time website project manager within the organization is not normally cost effective, and their responsibilities may include other responsibilities within the website team, which can result in conflicts of interest. While an outside Project Manager has no such vested interests other than to ensure the project gets done.
Team work is critical, as well as knowing when to bring in the right resources to maximize the value each team member brings to the project. For example Zanka Consulting has seasoned facilitators that can guide the team to maximum performance while enjoying the project. Look to the outside (your group or organization) for a facilitator, it doesn’t matter if the person has no knowledge of your industry, actually this is better since the person will not have the urge to contribute, a good sign in any professional facilitator.
Look also for an organization such as Zanka Consulting who can bring considerable experience in web-redesign project management and who will transfer that process and knowledge to your team so that the ongoing maintenance and development will be successful.
Every project will be different so the project manager should work with your team to determine the extent of your needs and design a project plan that will work with your timelines and requirements. All projects follow the basic elements below, a good organization can guide you through part or all of this process, or work with your project manager to build a successful redesign project.
1. Develop a basic plan for the project
- Project Charter
- Team members
- Timeline
2. Vision
- Review website strategic plan and establish website objectives
- Perform an environmental assessment
- User segmentation
3. Discovery –
- Assess the current website
- Website audit
- Website performance analytics ( log files or Google analytics)
- First Impression analysis
- Visitor behaviour analysis
- key words, search terms pages viewed, path to conversion pages, landing pages
- SWOT (Strength , Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)
- Competitive analysis
4. Action Plan
- Develop an action plan
- Information architecture
- Website framework/wireframe
- Performance measures
- Maintenance plan
- Ongoing improvement plan
The last 2 steps are usually performed by the web implementation team and the web maintenance team using the project plan and specifications from the previous step.
5. Design and Implement
6. Measure and improve
If you are familiar with project management process, you will recognize the basic elements, but adapted to the web environment. These are tried and true methodologies and they work, taking short cuts will be costly unless you are very sure of what you are doing. That is why professionals in facilitation, project management and web design are critical to your web redesign projects success.
Zanka Consulting specializes in the discovery process and can provide you the data for this analysis in an easy to understand reports to make it easier for you to make the critical decisions as well as save time and money trying to figure out which metrics or programs to use. If you are interested in speeding up your design/redesign process please contact us,)
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