Things I wish I’d known when starting website projects
As many charities look ahead to 2023 plans, I’m reminded of being in-house and the thrill of having a website budget being agreed, coupled with the anxiety of how to make it work.
Here are a few things that I wish someone had told me — ranging from the existential to the financial, and lots of internal conversations in between!
- How to work out what needs to go into a brief
- Getting internal stakeholders on-board from the start
- Budget approach
- Thinking about accessibility up-front
- Finding the right agency partner
1. Why are we here?
Before starting to write a website brief, ask yourself and your colleagues some fundamentals:
- Why does the website exist?
- Why do people use the website? And how will they be feeling and thinking when they visit the website?
- Why do you want/need a new website now?
- What works about what we already have?
Often, the answers will be broad and will vary depending on internal teams and perspectives. This is exactly why it’s worth considering upfront so that you can share this within the brief — it can then form a part of the agency’s discovery process.
Starting to ask these questions internally also introduces the user-driven priority internally — so that stakeholders can get used to this and ask questions upfront. It’s always better to have these conversations early (speaking from experience where it happened to me mid-way through UX process 😰!)
2. Writing your charity’s website brief
A website brief shouldn’t be a novel — but it should tell a story of why your organisation wants to rebuild now and what you hope to get out of it.
Key things to include are:
- Any significant organisational changes e.g. new strategy, new leadership, new brand — or if any of these are incoming!
- The Content Management System (CMS) that you’re using and your preferences and barriers to others. Include details of who uses the CMS now — and how you want to manage content going forward.
- Key functionality and integrations you want to keep or need from scratch
- Budget and how it breaks down (see next section!)
- How you want to work with your agency and how you see the process running
- Who is going to be involved internally and at what stages
Share your draft brief with colleagues and wider sector pals for feedback — I’ve always found it helpful to get second pair of eyes on these!
3. Working out your website budget
In most cases, there’ll be a budget assigned for the rebuild and you’ll have some flexibility within that to shape the approach that you want to take. At this early stage, you should flag to senior stakeholders that the rebuild project (and therefore budget) is not the endpoint, and that a longer term view is needed.
Working towards this budget split is ideal:
Total website budget = rebuild + retainer (support + enhancements)
Rebuild — the Big project that includes discovery, design and build.
Support — the hosting and ‘lights on’ package to keep your website running and deal with bug fixing
Enhancements — ongoing development of the features and functionality, keeping the site fresh and learning from data
Often, organisations allocate a rebuild budget and a small support budget, which doesn’t allow for features and content improvements on your site going forward. For example, your support agreement could cover lights on support but will not be enough to optimise your donate funnel based on data and user insight.
Each organisation’s approach to budget is different but generally a good rule to follow is that you should be prepared to spend the build budget cost again on iterating your site over a 3–5 year period e.g £50k build could mean £50k enhancement over 3 years.
Long-term budgeting is also a key part of viewing and treating your website like a product and not a project. With this product mindset, you’ll be constantly monitoring, nurturing and improving it — and your agency will be on this journey with you.
4. Don’t sweat the homepage!
Content is the heart of your website and the reason why your audiences come. This is a key concept to land internally from the start — not only in terms of information architecture (IA) but also in how the content will be updated ongoing.
I’ve been told several times to “just get the website live and copy and paste words and pictures in later”. This is a mistake — and also feels pretty crappy to be on the receiving end of.
Content strategy is integral to the effectiveness of user journeys and should be prioritised from the start and revisited in every conversation about website improvements going forward.
Another content-related mistake that I’ve made is to spend too much time stressing about the homepage. Yes, it is the ‘shop window’ but it is also not usual for traffic to be driven to the homepage — instead users will go directly to the deeper pages of your site and a smaller % will come directly to your homepage. So, don’t sweat the homepage! In fact, it’s a great example of something that can be constantly reiterated once the site goes live.
At William Joseph, we use a homepage planning framework that starts with user needs and (agreed) stakeholder priorities to inform the content that needs to be created/repurposed. This helps to stay closer to your goals and avoid the homepage becoming a political hot potato.
5. Inclusive web design
Accessibility should be a priority for all websites and it’s been exciting to hear people talk more about inclusive design now — where you actively meet a full spectrum of needs as part of your site experience. These needs could be social, cultural and situational — ranging from how the site feels for a person with disabilities or neurodiverse needs to how the content is written for someone who is in a state of distress.
It’s good to prioritise accessibility from the start, including in your brief and asking your agency to consider how the user journeys and content strategy can address these. It’s much harder to get right — and therefore more token — to tack accessibility on afterwards.
6. Finding the right website agency
Tender processes work the best when they are not set up as competitive processes but as equitable ones — where the organisation and all of the pitching agencies understand that the organisation wants to find the best partner using the highest quality information that they can provide.
It’s also important to ask your agency about their values and how these are brought to life — and to also be prepared for them to ask the same of you; sharing values is a critical starting point.
For example, if collaboration is something that you both prioritise then you’ll probably expect lots of involvement with people across your organisation who have different perspectives, instead of a more closed project process where a smaller team may be making decisions.
More thoughts and resources
Finding an agency partner and project process
- Find the right partner by going beyond the brief
- A safe, accessible agency pitch process
- 8 benefits of an agile approach
- Dovetail resource — How to write a brief
Accessibility and inclusive design
This blog was inspired by a session I delivered at a Think CS Digital Forum in the Summer (thanks again to the Think CS team and the charities that are a part of their Digital Forum!) and I wanted to share now for anyone embarking on website plans for 2023.
