Redesigning Your Company Website?

At the beginning of a project, you can’t know everything that’s going to come up. There are so many ideas and tactical shifts to come as you dig into the details. With so much uncertainty, nailing down deliverables on a redesign project can be extremely challenging. It’s important to understand fee structure and to consider whether incentives are aligned. Typically project-based fees, or hourly fees incentivize developers to slow play the project, and large upfront payments limit their skin in the game. Here’s how to launch quickly and minimize upfront development cost.

Are you working with experts or lower level assistants? Larger agencies like to sell one thing, then cheap out on staff and execution once the deal is signed. Make sure you know who is going to be your point of contact and who will be handling your account ongoing. This matters…a lot. Ask questions about the team. Who is the point person? What happens if they leave the company or get reassigned? What if it turns out you just don’t like them, or don’t like working with them? What if your business environment shifts and you need alternate expertise?

Performance doesn’t lie. Unless you’re tracking what’s working and what isn’t, even a room full of smart people is just guessing. The truth is that nobody knows (us included) what optimal tactics will be until you begin measuring real world results. Anyone who claims to have all the answers is either lying or ignorant to the realities of business. The only way to optimal performance is some sort of commitment to recurring iterations of review, prioritization, execution and measuring results. Here’s how to prioritize the stuff that matters.

While details matter, building websites is probably not in your job description. If you’ve got more valuable things to do, make sure you’re not wasting your time fiddling with web pages. You want to craft arrangements that allow you to keep an accurate pulse on progress and performance, while freeing you up to do other things. At the same time, you also want to make sure that your development agency isn’t going to hold everything captive. Ask about access, ownership, and how all these things are handled on an ongoing basis. Here’s how to steer the ship and compete favorably online.

Chances are, the impetus for reaching out to a website design agency is that something isn’t quite right at the moment. It could be certain functionality, design aesthetics, integrations, or thousands of other things that brought you to the table. The key is how do we avoid returning back to a similar situation in the future? Companies tend to focus time/energy/money on a redesign. When it’s finished, everyone high-fives each other and goes back to their real jobs…only to have things fall into disrepair a year or two later. Are you spending your entire budget upfront? Are you saving resources for improvements after the site launches? How do you avoid ending up back where you are today with an outdated website? Here’s all you need to know about continuous improvement on a flat monthly budget.

Choosing a website development agency is an important business decision. As well as you vet the company, things just might not work out the way you intend. What then? What if the agency doesn’t deliver on its promises? What if they go out of business or people leave the company? What happens if you want to get out of the contract and move on? Who owns the assets? Is the site built on a proprietary platform or will you easily be able to hire a new developer to pick up where they left off? What business risk are you taking on if everything goes wrong? Make sure you clarify your exit strategy before you get started.