You’ve decided to work with an agency that you connect with and will produce the best website you’ve ever had. They have the experience and expertise to guide you through the process, and will be there for you at every step of the way, meeting and exceeding your expectations.
Here at Fifteen we pride ourselves on our web project management. We are here to support you through your journey with us and the website through to the end, and after offering support and advice on how to use your website.
We understand that while you’ve been selected as the project manager within your company, you also have your average day’s work to deal with. So, we’ve written some tips and tricks to help you manage the workload of a new website build.
Project Start Meetings
In order to make sure that everyone is on the same page, always have a project start meeting, this allows you and the agency you are working with time to talk about the design of the website, the feel of the website, your aims and objectives and potential deadlines for the site. During our project start meetings, we introduce you to the team who will be working on the project, so they can get a full understanding of your and your business.
After the project start meeting, we often draw up a Project Scope, outlining details of the project, a design plan, technical specification, milestones, and information that we need from you, such as Logos, FTP’s/hosting information, Domain information etc. It’s important to compile this information as soon as you can and send it over to us.
Being Honest with Design
Our amazing creative team will get to work on sitemapping, wireframing and designing your website, based on the discussions from the project start meeting and the project scope document.
It’s important to always be honest with the designer, and voice your opinions on what is provided, whether you like something or you don’t, if you’ve got specific ideas of what you would like to see in spaces, please send them over to us, so we can pass the information to the design team. This allows us to take inspiration from stuff you like and love, and implement it into the design of your website.
If your in a position where you’ve got to pass the design off through a table of directors it can be difficult, you have to remember that you can’t please everyone and to think of the business and the people who will actually be using the website.
You can read more about how to get the most out of your designer.
Preparing the Content & Images
This is a common pitfall for the majority of new website builds. We recommend that after the sitemap has been confirmed, you take as much time as you can per week to compile the content of your website. If your day job is highly demanding we know that this can be a problem, so speak to your line manager and ask for an afternoon/day to spend on writing new content for the website.
Having all your content and images ready for the milestone deadline within your project scope will allow the project to keep on time, and be completed quickly, meaning you can get your new website out to your audience in no time!
If your having problems writing your content, let us know, we can often provide valuable help with straplines and key information. We also provide a copywriting service.
Find out more about Copywriting for Web
The Final Stages
When a website goes into development, a good project manager will keep you up to date with the progress of the build, once your content and images are in the website, you will be sent a link to the staging version of the website, where you can see the site in a full functioning state. (Each agency works differently, but this is how we work).
You will have feedback and tweaks at this stage, and again please be honest, and let the agency know your thoughts.
Fifteen’s experience and expertise working with the web allows us to build websites that are built with current web trends and best practice web development in mind, however, sometimes, these don’t work for your customer base, and no one knows this like you do.
Once tweaks are made, and testing has been done on the website, you will need to check the website over and approve the website to go live. This can either be done internally at your offices or arrange a meeting with your agency to run through the website together.
We have a projector screen that allows us to display the website in a large view allowing everyone to see the site and run through it together.
Once this has been done, you will be given a launch date! (Exciting times!)
Training
It’s important that you know how to use your website, here at Fifteen, we use CMS (content management systems) to build our websites, which allow you to edit all the content and images throughout the website.
Fifteen spend time training you and other members of your team likely to use the website.
This can be done before or after launch. You will often have questions about how key elements work, so please come prepared with a list of questions.
At this stage, if you are interested in Digital Marketing, let your agency know, we offer a range of digital services that would compliment your new site launch, and would benefit your business to gain more revenue and inquiries. These services could include PPC, SEO, Remarketing and Affiliate Schemes for example.
View our Digital Marketing Services
After Launch
Providing that your agency has provided good service throughout the project, they should keep in touch with you after the launch of the website, to make sure that your happy with how the site is performing and how you’re using the website.
The team at Fifteen are always on hand to help and support you after your website has launched. We monitor websites for the first 3 months after launch to make sure that they are performing as intended, and will make suggestions on improvements/changes that we can make depending on these results.
Do you need help with your web support?
It is important to remember that having a website, takes some investment of time.
In order to keep your looking fresh and active, we recommend that you blog weekly, and keep your content and images as up to date as possible throughout the website.
Many of our clients have ‘Web Wednesdays’ where they spend an afternoon working on blog posts for the website for the following week and making tweaks and amends where possible.
We also recommend setting up quarterly meetings with your agency, to discuss the performance of the website and any future development work you may want doing on the website.