The 6 stages to create an industry leading website
Development
You may have had budget approval for a new website and everyone is excited and motivated to get the project underway. But you know you also need to ensure collaboration, inclusion, agreement, education and continued support from all your stakeholders.
Sometimes our clients approach us with briefs which detail exactly what they need and, at other times, they just know there’s a challenge that they need to overcome but are happy to explore a range of options to solving it. And we do love a challenge! If you’d like us to provide insight that might help you overcome some of your marketing stumbling blocks, or just want a fresh perspective to take forward, contact Gill or Kirsty (gillian@lewis.co.uk or kirsty@lewis.co.uk) to arrange a free strategy session with the team at LEWIS.
To give you a taster, here’s the 6 stages that we typically follow to help our clients plan out their strategic approach and make sure they have fun whilst doing it!
1. Discovery
The goal at this stage is to create a project brief which is highly personalised to your needs and the needs of your audience. It’s helpful to do some preliminary research to discover everything we can about your audience. Then, by way of a workshop, work with your team to understand the deal breakers: technical needs, niggling challenges, big ideas, lingering ‘what if…?’ thoughts, hard data points and anecdotal insights.
2. Direction
This stage sets the course of the work that needs to be delivered by defining what will be achieved and how. Using your team’s feedback on the brief and your findings from stage 1, you can segment the audience and create objectives for each persona and map out that all important user and data journey.
The aim of this stage is to create a scope document which lays out project milestones, a clear technical roadmap and project KPIs. This is the touchstone document(s) for the project, and you should gather stakeholder sign off so everyone’s accountable as they work.
3. Creation
Now it’s time to make something! In this phase, you’ll bring in your best thinkers and makers to conceive and build a beautiful and fitting solution to your brief. Fundamental to this is creating and maintaining a highly collaborative working method. During COVID that might be through daily check ins to identify blockers and dedicated Teams channels for each project.
It might feel a bit ‘quiet’ at this stage but there is a lot going on behind the scenes. We recommend that your team build weekly meetings into the project plan. The objective of these meetings should be to get your feedback, seek answers to queries and collect the content you need.
4. Delivery
At this point, you have your lovely new website. But now it’s time to make it as good as it possibly can be. If anything isn’t working as expected then test it, flag it and fix it now. We recommend tools such as Trello to manage this testing process but Google Sheets and Microsoft Planner will work equally well.
The conceptual thinking is largely done, but in this phase you can get into testing the details that make sure you’re delivering something that works for your audience. It’s time to start assessing how the work is achieving against those KPIs from stage 2 of the process.
5. Amplify
It can be easy to get complacent once the work is live. But this is where opportunities lie to build upon those KPIs and looking at how your content is performing. Regular content updates via your news or blog area will significantly improve SEO results. And using tools like SEM Rush will give you an insight into what your users are searching for and what terms you can tap into.
It’s about staying inspiring, excited and switched on.
6. Support
Whether you work with an agency or an in-house team the website team shouldn’t exit stage left when the site is complete, it’s important they stay tuned in to offer support, give advice, monitor and help manage future plans. Ensuring the future site owners to take accountability of the asset now and the future.
For a limited time, we’re offering a free strategy session with our team of experts. It’ll give you a unique opportunity to challenge us to provide insight into some of your current challenges. You can contact Gill or Kirsty to arrange a time that suits on gillian@lewis.co.uk or kirsty@lewis.co.uk.
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