Find out how to assemble the dream team that will ensure your website not only looks great, but performs well and generates those all important enquiries.
Like building house, a web development project requires a number of specialist team members, each contributing at key stages of the process. As the marketing manager it is your job to not only commission the project but to ensure that the right team are in place and that’s no easy task. But get it right and your project will not only proceed on time but more significantly will be done properly and yield the results that your board expects.
Leading the team from the top is you, the marketing manager keeping everyone on track, ensuring the brief, schedule and budget are all adhered to. Supporting you you’ll need a marketing executive who will be your no 2 when you’re attention is required elsewhere.
A copywriter or team of writers will be required to prepare all of the content you specified in stages 1 and 2 (see last weeks blog). While it may be tempting to handle this in house or to get divisional managers within your business to write their own sections, resist the temptation and you’ll get a much more consistent style of writing and a better end result.
Your copywriters will need to work closely with a dedicated on-page SEO expert who will oversee the way your content is shaped to include your chosen keywords and to make sure the copy is correctly optimised for search performance.
At this point it's also worth turning your attention to photography. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and on a website images increase user attention and engagement massively. In an ideal word and if your budget allows, commission a photographer and/or a graphic design to create infographics to illustrate your content. Unique content with a consistent look and feel sets your business apart from its competitors. If budgets are tight you could consider and image library like iStock or ShutterStock but be careful, hackneyed content stands out a mile.
To get the look and feel right, you will need two designers; a senior designer to handle the website’s creative look and feel and a user experience designer to translate the visual concepts into a working web layout. Normally this is handled with wireframes first, which are then completed by the visual designer. The senior designer will also be responsible for ensuring that the visuals created are on message with your brand positioning and fulfil your brief.
Your designers will need to work with a senior developer who will monitor the design process from a technical perspective.
When the designs are approved your senior developer will instruct a team of web developers to code the website. Supporting the senior web developer will be the user experience designer again who will ensure the visitor journeys are successfully created and the on-site SEO specialist who will monitor the code from an optimisation standpoint.
At the end of the process and depending on your budget you will need independent web testers to check the new site, a proof reader to check your content in place and finally your marketing exec to check that all items in the production schedule have been fulfilled. Some of these actions can be automated, tools like BrowserStack are great for testing your site across multiple browsers.
It sounds like a large team, but each specialist dips in and out of the project as it progresses so you rarely have a room full of people all working on the project at once.
What makes this the ultimate web development team is that every team member has a specialist task, making the team very efficient, no one is spread too thin. It may sound expensive approaching a team like this but because of the efficiencies it's actually more cost effective. It's much like my analogy of a housing developer who employs skilled bricklayers, sparks, plumbers and carpenters rather than handling it all with one team of overstretched tradesmen.
So how do you manage all of this? Most full service agencies, Quattro included, have dedicated professional to fulfil these roles. This means that you can find your ultimate team with one supplier. Look for established teams that approach web development in this way. They will be the teams with individuals who are used to collaborating with each us and used to multitasking on projects as developments progress.
An alternative route is to source each team member yourself, but I would caution you on this route, as chemistry (which is a huge part of an established team) is often missing from freshly built teams and without chemistry managing a project of this scale can be arduous.
In planning a new website there are a huge number of pieces that have to go together to make it a success. To make sure you don’t miss some of the key ones, we’ve created a guide to 10 SEO mistakes many businesses make as they rebuild their websites. Click on the link below to grab your FREE copy and follow the website design tips as you work through your website rebuild.
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PHOTO CREDIT: People vector designed by Freepik . Office vector designed by Freepik