How to avoid ruining your own website
You decided to launch a website for your business. Now you’re in the process of choosing the appropriate studio or agency to create one and maybe feel a bit overwhelmed. How can you increase the chances of making your site serve your business needs?
Ugly truth
Let’s discuss a somewhat ugly truth: website projects are unpredictable. And it’s not just because they’re challenging to design or develop. Everybody is very optimistic about how a project will happen, and how much time will it take. But what happens when things don’t go as planned?
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.“
— Mike Tyson.
Thing is, it’s in the very nature of a web project to be unpredictable. It involves a multidisciplinary team of people looking at the project from different perspectives. Each of these people can influence the flow of the project in unpredictable ways. But, is it possible to ride the wave of random circumstances to create something that inspires, makes money, and showcases something cool?
When things go downhill
I’ve had an opportunity to work with a wide range of brands creating smaller campaign websites, large SaaS product showcases, or smooth highly-interactive experiences. And while those projects turned out great, it doesn’t always play out like that. Sometimes, unfortunately, things can go downhill.
What do I mean by downhill?
Breached budgets, prolonged timelines, scope changes, lack of focus on business goals… you name it.
These are not as common in smaller projects, but larger ones can be tricky.
Imagine this scenario: You (as a client) are building a website and that alone can take 100% of your available time and energy. On top of that, imagine that you don’t have a good relationship with your agency. For example, you don’t feel that your input is seriously considered, or you don’t have an easy way to communicate. Also, you’re not 100% confident they’re up to the task, but now you invested a lot, and you’re — for lack of a better word — stuck with them.
This can happen even if everybody is a top-notch expert in their area, but their teamwork is where all of that comes to fruition.
A good working relationship takes effort to maintain. But, for now, let’s focus on some things we should try to avoid.
1. Lack of trust
I am putting this one first as it’s the most important one. When starting a project we’ll need to have a relationship with a minimum of trust. I agree that trust should be earned but if we start a project without having any, we can miss out on a lot of good ideas.
Once we had a client that insisted we use their outdated visual branding for a new website.
While not an impossible task, we did not manage to have a constructive conversation about possible improvements to a brand’s visual expression so we can apply it to a website in a more modern form.
The client did not want to adapt anything (even after we offered to do it without extra cost) and had zero confidence we could push it to the next level. It was a missed opportunity, but that was their informed decision. We ended up with a very conservative website. The client was happy. We felt it could have been better.
So what happened? The client believed that the only way to success was to be absolutely consistent with their current brand. We, on the other hand, were way too focused on making it look good. While both approaches had their own merit, a lack of trust on both sides prevented us consider each other’s perspectives and try to get the best from both worlds.
2. Not expecting the unexpected
As I’ve said before, websites are complex and unpredictable situations happen.
Humans tend to be overly optimistic when estimating how much time they need to complete their own work, so this is something that should be taken into account.
Again, it’s in the very nature of any project to be unpredictable. Whether we’re talking about sudden scope changes, bugs, or deadline breaches (on the studio or client side), we need to embrace unpredictability and adjust along the way by replanning, reprioritization, and continuous budget or deadline adjustments.
3. Fixed-scope thinking
One of the tools we’re using to make sure clients get the best bang for their buck is adjusting the scope of a project. That’s one of the reasons we have discovered and ask a lot of questions about your target, business goals, or other specific things.
In these situations, it’s best not to be too rigid about the functionalities or requirements of a project. As long we’re working towards project goals we’re on track.
This also applies to website upgrades. Website as a digital product has the flexibility of being able to be upgraded or expanded post-launch, and It’s okay to test some ideas in the wild before committing to a full-scope website. We took the same approach with our website, too.
4. Expecting absolute control over the output
Nobody knows what the project will look like from start to finish. Even when we agree on the visual style, changes can still happen. A new idea or a new constraint can make an agency shape the output in different, sometimes drastic ways.
Here is an extreme example: one of the projects we were making good progress with went through a complete visual direction change pretty much after all the pages were defined and finished. This was prompted by making some last-minute changes in our design and felt limited by what we had come up with until that point.
So, we decided if we wanted to take this to a quality level that reflected our skills — a complete rehash would need to happen. Of course, we needed to implement a new visual direction on a single page and checked that with the client (as they needed to greenlight our crazy idea).
This was the moment where all of that trust manifested. The client was happy with our idea so we basically redesigned the whole website (around 12 pages).
None of that would happen if the client was set in their ways or wanted to have absolute control over the final product. They trusted us we’ll do our best.
That website won 5 awards.
5. Scope creep
We define scope creep as the addition of new features and requests that go beyond the initial agreed-upon scope (ie. the amount of work to be done).
This is a classic issue in digital projects and can come as a result of incomplete discovery, lack of foresight for certain needs (“I’ll know when I see it”), or simply the evolution of the company during a longer project. Most of the projects experience some kind of scope creep; whether that’s an extra mile from the studio or simply something important for the client which was not noted before.
The best way to minimize scope creep is to have a quality discovery workshop to determine key requirements. Workshops cannot predict every single one of the requirements, but they operate on the Pareto principle. Around 80% of results can be accomplished with 20% of the effort. If you manage to identify that 20% of key areas (best bang for your buck), that’s a pretty good place to be.
6. Misaligned vision
Sometimes — for companies that are in rapid expansion — can be very challenging to maintain a single vision. This can escalate into an information vacuum where it’s challenging to collect insight into services or products we need to represent. This is something beyond the studio’s reach to fix: if a client cannot provide or get to someone who can actually provide information for a website then the company might not be mature/stable enough to engage in the website-building process. And this is perfectly fine. Creating a website while the company is in flux can is always challenging for clients and agencies, and it’s okay to postpone the project until things have a bit of time to settle.
In conclusion
So, will this advice prevent projects go downhill? No, but your chances are better now. Sometimes, no matter what kind of preparations you make, unpredictable situations can happen. However, if we have room to adapt to that we can still make our business relationship enjoyable.
Like what you read? Did you have projects that went downhill?
Let me know in the comments :)
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