A lovely cup of tea

A lovely cup of tea...

Kicking back in the office with a fresh brew, after finishing another proposal this week, I realised that I had included quite a large section on ‘how we do it’, namely our process for tackling web projects. Web development or project management strategies are like diets – there are so many of them out there and most web people have probably tried them all. Actually, not many based on cabbage soup to be fair, so maybe that doesn’t quiiiiiite stack up, but you get what I mean. Scrum vs. Agile vs. Waterfall, the list goes on. So, which do we follow? Hmn….can I duck that question and instead let you know:

  1. What we do
  2. What we don’t do
  3. What we have learned from our join experience

as that is probably more illuminating. Over the next few weeks, I will break apart the individual elements above and give some examples from recent projects to illustrate how they work in reality. Do you do any of the following when starting a web project?

What we do

1. Research - put on a very large brew and grab a pen and paper, its research time! Before we put finger to key and set out what the project is going to be, we throw ideas around, talk about what we have seen recently and browse around to check out similar projects that have succeeded or fallen at the wayside, to see if anything can be borrowed.

2. Proposal - all of our best ideas go into one of our proposals, designed to be easy to read and to allow you to pick and choose what you want to go ahead with. We like to give you more than you were expecting, maybe even some surprises and things you weren’t thinking of, to give you some real choice there.

3. Kickoff - the most important meeting in the world! We like meetings about as much as you probably do, but the first one, the kick off is the most important. Its a chance to meet everyone on the team from our side and yours, as well as sketch out the main details of the project. When we say sketch, we do mean sketch. The large paper and pens come out to draw new pages and discuss.

4. Survey – after hearing from you about what you want from your digital project, we really recommend you ask some of your current users / listeners what they think. It might re-inforce what you are current thinking, it might well not. Even so, it does give you a good baseline opinion to return to later on, once the new shiny project is installed. We can help you set this up so don’t worry if this sounds daunting.

5. Moodboard – once we have heard what you think and what your users think, its time to make a moodboard. This is really a collection of colours, fonts, layouts and other rough design ideas to match your early thoughts. We find it a very useful first step to show you some early ideas and get a quick response to feed into the next stage.

6. Write – it is very easy to forget that websites actually need to be written. Before anything can really be designed, the design team need to know what type of content they are going to have to include.

7. Design – coming with a design that suits you and your project can be tricky. It should always be done with the users in mind, which may or not equate to your own personal taste or not. We have collected a large amount of visual bookmarks that you can flickr through, to see what sort of styles you think are good for the project and the ones you don’t. We then create a design and revise it twice before signing it off.

8. Build – one of the most exciting and probably the longest phase in any project, is the welding together of the design and content created so far, to build the project. This is usually in our Content Management System VEBO on our staging servers. This allows you and us to play around with it before it goes live, so we can perfect it, polish it and tweak it as much as we like.

9. Test – an area that we could easily devote several blog posts about, testing the project is key. This will usually involve lots of different types of testing including browser testing, code validation and more. Do ask if you want to know more about this before we cover it in a future post.

10. Redo – you only test, because you want and need to redo things. This is an iterative process, gradually refining the project until its ready for final launch.

11. Launch – break out the sparkly, its launch time! Usually, in the two to three week period before this, we will help you roll out a marketing campaign to make the most of this event, through social and conventional media. We do this because we want your project to succeed as much as you do. It’s also fun, being able to tell people how good the new thing is.

12. Re-survey – remember those user surveys we did way back when? Yep, now is the time to repeat them. You could either do this with the same group of people, or just ask random visitors to the site to repeat the survey work. This could also involve elements of A / B testing on key parts of the site, to make sure they are doing as much as they can for you.

13. Measure – it is all about the numbers these days. Well, I think it probably always was, but anyway, visitors, page view times, referrers and more are all important. Are the numbers up or down? Are they the right numbers? Where is successful and where isn’t?

14. Review – two to three months after the project launches, we like to arrange a review of the whole process with you. How did you feel the project went? What was great about it all? Anything we can do better for next time? The main focus of the review meeting is to assess whether the project was a success based on your criteria and what the future holds for it. Rarely does a project get launched and just end there, there is always a future for a project, even if it has to change form slightly.

What we don’t do

Rush. Use Comic Sans. Impose Ideas. Do The Same Old. Be Too Conventional. Take Too Long.

What we have learned from experience

Get Content Early. Listen. Revise and Adapt. Get Feedback. Survey and Test throughout. Have Fun. Launch great things.

The Big Orange 14 Steps – 2 more than the average bear

Coming soon, the more complete guide in the next issue to the first few steps here, with some practical examples and great links. Honest! Stand by for incoming…

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