Website development

In the current state of the economy, businesses face budget cuts and we are all under pressure to eke out better results from diminishing resources. One of the most startling examples of this is the reluctance of the purse-holders to sanction investment into major new website projects.

Yet we know that digital marketing is measurable and businesses risk being left behind as competitors steal a march on them with their embrace of web 2.0 technologies and social media.

If anything, the necessity to invest now is greater than ever, and businesses that will come out of the downturn the strongest will be those that are regrouping and investing right now.

So there’s a dichotomy here. Ideal time to invest, but no (or limited) money. What can be done about it?

The current downturn can work to your advantage if you change your approach to development and address your activity one step at a time, breaking the work down page-by-page, feature-by-feature and issue-by-issue.

A planned and continual series of relatively small iterative improvements, learning and refining as you go along, can produce superior results.

Let me explain a bit of background here. A typical web rebuild project used to go like this: spend a lot of money and a lot of effort to – eventually – get your brand spanking big new website launched. And hand everything over to the junior exec that will post up a news item every six months. Let it sit there and do nothing, and in three years’ time, go through the whole exercise again.

In the meantime, your IT team will probably moan about the code they don’t understand and aren’t qualified to manage.

Your SEO people tell you that you need to spend another load of money changing the pages and rewriting the content so that you index better.

It needn’t be so. Agile, iterative or incremental development (it has a few names, but the idea is basically the same) is a much better approach to building and managing not only your website, but your entire digital presence (for the two cannot be separated these days).

There are a few simple principles behind it that the marketer should follow:

1. Start small. Focus on the core thing you need to say or do and be as streamlined as possible so you can get things done fast. It’s best to start small and realistic rather than create a bloated monster, ridden with functionality or content that no one uses or understands, or that doesn’t work well.

2. Have a vision or roadmap but focus on one thing at a time. This is difficult where the imperative is often to hit everything at once and everything seems interdependent. It isn’t. You have to make a few tough choices about what to prioritise, but your users should help you decide that anyway.

3. Release early, release often. Get your streamlined site launched as early as possible, learn what works and what doesn’t work and then make sure you build on this and update often. This is why it’s called incremental or iterative. Every time you update you can measure the effect, and you can experiment – taking an almost DM approach to test cells.

4. Involve your users as often as possible. This is critical and really the crux of what makes this approach successful. Engage with them about what they want. Survey them, test with them, ask them to rate your content, communicate new content updates to them and canvas opinion (which you can now do as you are updating often). Above all, listen.

5. Measure the effect of what you change. Don’t be afraid to drop or change things that don’t work.

This agile approach accommodates changing market conditions and changing user needs, allowing your site to grow and evolve quickly. Most of all, it will refine the effectiveness.

I’d just like to add that this is by no means just for new site development.

If anything, it works better for re-development or improvement of an existing site, where you can take small step-by-step changes by focusing on usability, site navigation, calls-to-action, lead generation, specific functionality, user engagement and testing social media techniques etc.

The pressure is on you to save money, and this is an excellent way to avoid the problem of justifying a single large investment.

Yet it is also, in the long run, a far more effective way to build the functionality you need, encouraging structured feedback from users and allowing you to focus on the areas that need most improvement instead of rebuilding the wheel every time. Now that’s a combination that works pretty well these days…