From Idea to Launch: Why Strategy Plays an Important Part in Your Website Project

I have so many questions for you:

• Would you hire a painter to paint your kitchen and allow them to pick the color for you?
• Would you pay out thousands for a new car without telling the dealer the options you want?
• Would you hire a designer to create a logo for your new business without providing them with so much as a color preference?

The only reason you would answer yes to any of those questions is simple: you don’t care. 

I’m going to guess you answered no to all of those questions, though, because in my 20 years of creating websites for clients, I have yet to run across one person who didn’t have an opinion about what they want for their website.

The ideas usually start out small, don’t they? You want a cool website that’s modern and easy for you to manage and update. Those ideas might be accompanied by a list of three to five websites you’ve seen that you really like for one reason or another. It’s all pretty straightforward.

The answer to that is very simple. Yes and no. 

As a website designer and developer, I need more information from you. I don’t want to badger you with a million questions that overwhelm you, but I do need to pin some things down before I commit to any pixels or code. The biggest factor in the success of a website project is a clear understanding of the project, shared between our team and you, the client. 

Once you’ve selected whom you are going to partner with on your website project, you’ll more than likely be working with a designated person to help establish this understanding. This could be the designer or developer directly, an account manager, or a project manager. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to this person as your website project consultant.

A collaborative effort should be the approach as you and your consultant work together, as a team, to determine the best approach to deliver a great product while also working to avoid communication problems so you agree on the issues that impact budget and timeline. 

At WebDevStudios, we start every website project with a Strategy and Planning Phase. That’s right, every project. Why? Because we want to make sure our clients get the best results for their investment. 

We take a deep dive into learning about your unique business goals, sales objectives, marketing strategies, and target market. We get to know you, and you get to know us. We work together to create a shared understanding of what website success looks like specifically for you.

Prepare to Do a Little Homework

Whether you prepare the information we need in the very beginning, or at some other point in our interactions, just know that you will eventually need to provide some details. You may not know what you don’t know and don't realize the details needed.

A good website consultant will help guide you by asking the right questions. Here are a couple of questions that you should anticipate at the very beginning of your relationship with your consultant. These are simple questions that I like to ask at the very beginning—the answers to these questions can give me some general ideas and thoughts about your project:

1. Is this a redesign for an existing website, or is this a brand new website? The answer to this question tells me a few things. If it is an existing website, I can go visit it and see what you have done with it so far; or if it’s a brand new website, I know that we are starting from scratch.
2. What is the name of your website? Do you have a URL? The name of the website gives me a general idea of the topic and the URL (or domain) for your website just allows me to understand that you’ve prepared that much.
3. Do you have a logo, or will you be needing one? If you have a logo, I’d like to see it, of course. From it, I can gather general ideas, like your preferred colors or fonts, and a general feel for the style. If you need a logo, then I know that I will need to add that to my list of items to discuss with you at a later date.
4. What are the two top goals you are looking to accomplish with this website? You may have more than two goals, but in the beginning, let’s pare it down to the two most important goals you want to accomplish. In my experience with doing websites for clients, common goals can include things like increase brand awareness, increase email sign-ups, increase revenue by 20%, or initiate a content marketing plan by adding a blog.
5. A year from now, after the celebration of the launch of your new website is a distant memory, what does success look like? Just imagine yourself in 12 months after the launch of the website we built together. You smile to yourself and say, “YES! That was the best thing I’ve done for my business to date!” Why? What would make you say that? Tell me, so I can help you make that happen!

The last two questions in the above list, numbers four and five, are the most important pieces of information I need to know when we kick off discussions about your website project. That information will really help inform me about the direction of our planning.

Terminology

Every freelancer, or web agency, employs different language, phrases, and terminology when they refer to the time they spend learning about your website, your ideas, and your goals. Familiarizing yourself with the terminology will help eliminate confusion. Here are a few terms to keep in mind:

• Discovery Phase → It’s all about discovering what you want and need for your website.
• Website Strategy and Planning → Consulting is about making strategic decisions based on what you’ve communicated and then planning out a strategy to build a digital experience that meets your goals.
• Requirements Gathering → Getting the specifications from you is important.
• Needs Analysis → What do you need? We’ll analyze those needs and create a plan.

It doesn’t matter what they call it; it’s all the same method of getting from A to Z, with the goal of building a plan for the design and development of your new website. For the remainder of this article, I refer to this process as a Strategy and Planning Phase. That is what we call it at my agency.

Anatomy of the Strategy and Planning Phase

Depending on what your needs are for your website build, the Strategy and Planning Phase will break down into several small meetings between you and your consultant. Depending on the size and scale of your project, the agency you have hired may have several people involved in the Strategy and Planning Phase to make sure they are bringing the right people with the right skills together to outline the best roadmap for your project.

Here is a list of several mini phases within the larger Strategy and Planning Phase, and some of the people and roles you may encounter: (Note: this list is not exhaustive, but it is typical.)

General Strategy

This is the initial phase of Strategy and Planning and typically dives into the basic stuff that your consultant needs to know in order to understand where to begin. Earlier in this article, I shared five initial questions that you will most likely be asked in those initial meetings. Those questions are the beginning of a General Strategy phase. 

This period of time allows you and your consultant to get to know one another better and helps your consultant start to piece together the framework of a plan, timeline, and budget. Expect the ‘big picture’ questions to get asked here. Questions like:

• What does your company do?
• Who is your target audience?
• What is the purpose of your website?

You will discuss goals, answer questions on preferences, share some examples of ideas—all of this is geared towards defining the direction of the rest of the Strategy and Planning Phase.

Website Audit

An audit will likely be something your consultant will recommend, if you have an existing website—particularly if the goal of the project is to add design and/or functionality to your website, as opposed to building a brand new one. 

Audits are typically performed by a website engineer, who will take a look at the current performance of your website from a page speed standpoint. Page speed tests help us understand where we can help improve the performance of your site to improve the visitor experience and search engine optimization. 

Audits also take a look at things like code integrity, security, best practices and keeps an eye out for outdated software, plugins, script libraries, and the like. An audit is the best way for a development team to understand what they are dealing with, from a code standpoint, where any points of vulnerability are, and how our team can help improve the overall functionality, security, and performance of your website.

One tip I always like to mention is borne out of my experience. Once the audit has been completed and the report has been generated for you, be prepared for your website consultant to come back with not-so-great news about the state of your current website. 

When we do audits at WebDevStudios, honesty is my number one priority. If the code is a mess, it’s not going to do you or me any favors by trying to sugar coat it. Many times, I have come across websites that have a less-than-optimal codebase that is either insecure and vulnerable, outdated or lacking in best practices and performance optimization. I am not saying this will always be the outcome; it’s good to be prepared, though.

Design Strategy

This step in the Strategy and Planning Phase is mostly about the visual look and feel of your new website. Team members you may interact with during this phase can include a graphic designer, a user interface (UI) or user experience (UX) designer, and/or a front-end engineer.

Design Strategy usually starts out with a lot of questions about your preferences for the visual look and layout of the different pages and sections of your website. This is also where your designer will ask for any creative assets you may already have for your business, these kinds of assets can include:

• Style Guide → This is a document that provides guidelines for the way your brand should be presented from both a graphic and a language perspective. The purpose of a style guide is to make sure that multiple contributors create in a clear and cohesive way that reflects the corporate style and ensures brand consistency with everything from design to writing.
• Fonts → If you have preferred fonts that you are already using for your business branding for things like business cards, letterheads, brochures, advertising, etc., consider using the same fonts on your website, if feasible. This helps create brand consistency across all of the various platforms and methods of communication that comes out of your business.
• Logo → This is an obvious one: if you have an existing logo for your business, you probably want to use the same logo for your business website. Be sure to provide your designer with a good, high-resolution version of your logo. Reliable formats include .psd, .ai, .eps, .pdf, and .svg.
• Photography → Most design agencies can help provide stock photography for your website if needed. However, if you already have photography that you prefer, then be prepared to provide that. This is particularly important if you are hoping to have a team page on your website where you may want to display photographs of your team members. Be sure you have those photographs first before you commit to having such a page developed.
• Iconography → MOST clients do not come to the table with their own iconography. However, there are several different and lovely icon libraries available on the web that you may have a preference for already. If so, be prepared to provide that information to your designer.

The topic of Design Strategy is really a stand-alone subject matter all by itself (hmmm… ideas for a future article?), but the end goal, or the expected deliverable from a completed Design Phase, are a full set of design mockups. 

How many mockups are really dependent upon the budget that you’ve agreed on; however, typically, we mock up several different pages for clients to make sure we have covered design elements needed. A typical set of website mockups include:

• Home page
• About Us page
• Contact Us page
• The blog page, blog articles, and archives
• Various landing pages (used for different marketing purposes)
• Products, Cart, and Checkout pages (if eCommerce)

Of course, every website is different; and you may have lots more pages and sections to your website than those I’ve listed above. You and your designer will work together to make sure you have all the mockups you need for your project. 

In the end, your designer will ask you for your approval before mockups are finalized, which are prepared and used for the development of your website.

Technical Strategy

This part of the Strategy and Planning Phase covers all of the technical specifications that are required for your website project. The requirements gathered in this phase will define things like the technologies that will be used to make sure the functionality of your website meets your specifications. The people involved in this phase of Strategy and Planning can include engineers, your designer, and web strategists

For the most part, web development engineers already know the how of building websites, but really understanding what your goals are, what you would like your users to experience, and how you would like your content arranged and delivered to your visitors are the biggest priorities here.

For example, if you are planning on having a contact form on your website, the engineers will ask some of the following questions:

• What kind of data do you need to collect in this form? (i.e., name, email, phone, address)
• What email address do you want the form contents delivered to once the user clicks the submit button? Is there more than one email address it should get delivered to?
• Are you planning on using any lead generation applications, like Hubspot or Salesforce, to integrate with your contact form?

See, it’s not enough to know that you want a contact form. The engineers need to know how they should build that form so that it meets your specifications. The same holds true for any technical functionality for your website from navigation menus, headers, footers, content architecture, and more.

Data Strategy

This phase is important in cases where data or content is going to be migrated from one or more source(s) into your new website. For example, if you have a current website that is powered by Drupal and you are planning on moving to WordPress for this new build, then the data migration needs to be planned. You will probably work with a data engineer for this phase. 

The data engineer will likely ask you to provide a sample of data from your current website. This can be in the form of a database export. Different platforms have different ways and methods of storing data; and if you are unsure of how that happens on your current website, the engineer you are working with will help guide you through making sure they have access to the information they need.

When we do Data Strategy at WebDevStudios, we make sure to include an exercise called Data Mapping. This effort takes the data structure from your existing website and maps it to the data structure for your new website, ensuring that no data is lost in the process. 

Additionally, this is also the time when we make sure that the URLs for all of the different pages on your site match, and if they don’t, the engineer will make a note to include 301 redirects so that you don’t lose any of your hard-earned search engine traffic. A data mapping document and data migration plan are then created.

Third-Party Integration Needs

You may not think that you need any third-party services for your website, but you would be surprised to find out that is exactly what you need. You may want to integrate popular social media sharing for Twitter and Facebook, etc. to make sure visitors to your website can easily share your content with their social audiences. 

Also, you may decide that you want any articles or blog posts you publish to automatically post to your own social media profiles, taking some of the work out of managing your social marketing strategy. This is an example of third-party integration. “Third-party” refers to any service or technology that you want to use, but is not a part of your website. It’s an external service.

Other examples include lead generation tools from services like Hubspot or Salesforce. Each of those services has different methods of integrating with your website and the engineer that you are working with for the technical strategy portion of the Strategy and Planning Phase will need to know of any services that you want integrating with your new website build.

What to Expect at the End

At the end of a Strategy and Planning Phase, you should have a solid understanding of what your website will include—everything from how it will look to how it will function. That is really what a Strategy and Planning Phase is all about. The last thing we want is to take a look at the finished project and say, “Uhh… that is not what I expected.”

Strategy and Planning are all about eliminating assumptions on both sides. Trust me when I say that engineers, designers, and web strategists can make a lot of assumptions on all things related to web development. That is mostly because they’ve been doing it for so long. But, your website is unique to you, your needs, and your goals. On our side, we need to have a solid understanding of what we are building for you so that when you do get the final product, your only reaction is, “YAY!”

Upon successful completion of the Strategy and Planning Process, we provide you with a comprehensive document called the Project Plan. This plan contains all of the requirements, goals, and functional/technical specifications needed to build your project from start to finish. 

The project plan document is utilized by our design and development team as a roadmap for project completion. It contains every expectation that you have for your projects and provides a plan that our in-house design and development teams follow. It is basically a document that tells us what we need to build and gives you all of the details on what you can expect as final delivery.

Expert advice goes a really long way on a complex project. Let our experts at WebDevStudios help guide the way through technical advice and direction, problem solving and infrastructure consulting.

Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Strategy & Planning is an important part of your website project. With proper collaboration and planning, we can ensure the success of launching your new website.