10 Reasons Why Web Projects Go Awry
Building a website these days has become practically easy but it can be terrifying to achieve the desired goals of attractiveness, uniqueness and functionality necessary to reach your business goals, hold the audience spell bond and deliver the right experience to keep them interested in your brand.
Poor execution and a lapse in the process leading up to building your digital edifice – website, can cost you the opportunity to connect with your target customer, make an impression and establish trust. This may sometimes lead to starting your project all over from the scratch and incurring significant loss in terms of cost, time, brand perception, trust and other resources.
In the series, we highlight the 10 common mistakes that makes many web projects go awry.
1. Don’t Hire Unqualified Developers
This perhaps is the most responsible factor for failed website projects, 7 out of 10 failed website projects are due to hiring the wrong hands for your web project. Business owners looking to manage cost and budget constraints trade-off the main essence of a website – value and performance by focusing excessively on the cost and neglecting the business objectives and goals. The ease with which anyone can pose as a web developer without knowledge and understanding of the rudiments, standards and parameters of achieving good delivery and functional results using content management website builder makes preying on business owners’ desperation for cheap solution – a bull’s eye. Often times most of these folks may not be qualified, understand the convention required to build your complex and automated website that will effectively power your business. This will leave wool hanging over your site design, appeal, functionality, performance and brand outlook.
While working to manage your budget, you should focus on hiring the right developer – that showcases value, expertise and multidisciplinary team to build your website. Afterwards you can hire an in-house resource to manage the site when it is launched and retain the service of external developer on need basis to save on budget.
2. Define the Scope and Requirement of your Project
Most times, client always wants to overrun the scope and requirement definition phase, it seems too complex and unnecessary. They want to leave everything to chance and get going without consideration for the end goal of the project.
For most first time business owners, it easy to always think you know what you want and expect to build everything you need at once. However when we seek to know details of what the business owner wants and how it will work, they practically slip into “I don’t know”. So it is important to explore a detailed planning process before embarking on your website project. As a business, ensure to list your “must have“, “good to have” and least important requirements to help you control cost and effectively manage the project scope. An undefined scope is a prerequisite for website project failure, the least you will get out of such approach is a half done site that has no bearing to your business goals and one you will be unhappy with for long. So work with your web project team to define and outline in specifics your needs from the onset.
3. Take Stakeholders Insight and Inputs
A major obstacle to website project success is the absence of stakeholders input and involvement when making key decisions in the formative stage. All important decision makers should be part of the process when discussing the project goals, features and outcomes to ascertain that it aligns with their expectations, business or corporate objectives and ROI.
This will help to save your business and the developer a considerable amount of time, resources, and energy that will have been otherwise wasted on negative communications, impressions and distrust as well as reduce the risk of communication gap. Many project end up in the trash when customers test the final demonstration of the website and realize that it’s a complete deviation from what they initially expected.
However making changes to the project at this stage can proof costly in terms of time and budget for both parties. So it’s advisable to outline the key success criteria at the beginning of the project and not after the project has been completed.
4. Overloading Your Project
Another monster that kills website project is requesting for what you want and things you don’t need in one single project. There is a clear difference between what you need and what you want. Avoid adding too many complexities to over burden your project with things you don’t need now but can be added later. It is important especially if you have a very complex website project to break it into phases and execute them in batches, you don’t have to build everything at once. Start with what is needed now and scale up or overhaul as you grow and have validated the basis for those requirement.
5. Designing Without Purpose or Function
I have seen websites that are awesomely and beautifully designed but with poor functionalities, this usually turns website into a graveyard. Where beautiful people lay dead and insignificant. It’s important to strike a balance between beautiful and functional designs, getting this right will breathe life into your website and deliver the desired engagement, performance and ROI.
This is why choosing the right agency with a combination of of designers and developers on it’s team, who can wire your functionality and visual design appeal together on a robust and scaleable platform to help you achieve the desired blend is critical. It is a red light street if your website fails to achieve beautiful aesthetics and useful functionality.
6. Proper Source Code Control
The advent of platforms for managing source-code control has seen many complex website through successful delivery and completion. Choose a development team that is open to best practices, track version and control source code who can provide documentations, comments and guides especially for complex web projects.
7. Lack of Good Project Management
The successful management and delivery of any project depends largely on good project management practices including a well defined structure and communication flow between the components teams and resources. Website projects are not excluded in this regard, a good web design agency or team will assign a Project Manager (PM) who will manage the successful planning, execution, monitoring, control and closure of your project.
The PM will serve as your go to guide and works with you to understand your needs, coordinate communication flow and provides periodic progress report from the development team to keep you abreast of your project and updates. This will ensure that the project stays on track as well as help you avoid pitfalls that could derail the project.
8. Hacking Core or Source Code
Every practice has its standard and ethics to guide and ensure service delivery as well as protect customers. This is also covered in web design as an industry. However, the preference for unprofessional designers and stop gap practitioners – who don’t have an idea about the ethics, the do’s and don’ts of the web design practice always proof costlier than the savings on project budget.
This is why hiring a qualified developer will save you more money on the long run than working with unqualified developers. Unqualified developers have limited expertise, resource and technical know-how to address critical issues or bug. Hence when faced with bugs or challenges, they result to hacking – the process of changing the source code structure – the code to create temporary untenable workaround.
Using this approach can results in recurring problems such as poor display, functional and quality performance that can cost your business downtime and loss of customers. As well, it can make it impossible for the site to complete site updates, security and bug fixes, leaving the site vulnerable to cyber attacks and exploits. Likewise your website may become impossible to maintain and completely irreparable by another team.
9. Avoid Kitchen Sink Syndrome
The kitchen sink syndrome is known as scope creep in project management and refers to the to changes, continuous or uncontrolled growth in a project’s scope, at any point after the project begins. As stated above, the need to involve key decision makers and proper planning at the beginning of a website project is crucial to a successful delivery. A proficient PM’s goal is to ensure properly defined, documented and controlled project while keeping track from both ends of the client and the development team.
Yeah, it’s possible for new ideas and requirement to come on board while a project is in development. However, there is a cost and time factor to such change request. While some changes may prove useful to improving user experience on the website. If not properly managed and controlled, scope creep is a kill switch that arises from lots of indecision and superfluous client request which can easily derail the entire projects. This should be avoided.
10. User Acceptance Test
So your web design is ready, what next? Agree beforehand what your success criteria would be with the developer from the start and go through a comprehensive User Acceptance Test – UAT phase to test and check the features and functions of the website to know if they work as expected before signing off.
You don’t want to end up with an epileptic and bug prone website that break down every day. This can be a major turn off for your customers when they can’t reach your website and huge cost issue going forward to your business.
Conclusion
To build a successful website that is appealing, effective and engaging to customers, you need to mark and sufficiently address these checklists. Leaving out any of the item on the list can undermine and derail the project; create performance issues and delay, trigger poor value delivery – ROI, as well as become a financial burden and/or lost to your budget.
So invest wisely, a great website can be a remarkable asset and boost your business competitive advantage.
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You can also leave your comment to share your experience if you’ve had any bad encounter with a web designer.