Tips for a Successful Web Project

Building a website can be a hard and stressful process at times, and there are common pitfalls that clients often make, resulting in a longer project than intended. We've rounded up our top tips below on how to avoid these common issues and keep your web project on track to be successful.

1. Be Clear on Your Tasks and Responsibilities

Right from the start of the project, you should be clear on every task that you need to complete throughout the project. Not only will this help in clarifying responsibility, it will help you to organise your time and prioritise the more important tasks over tasks that don't require your attention. If you have a team assisting you, you can then delegate the tasks, sharing the workload.

If you are unsure on who is responsible for a task, ask the question for avoidance of doubt then nothing gets missed.

2. Stick to Your Deadlines and Milestones

At the beginning of the project, you will be given estimated timings for the project including a launch date. Along with this will be milestones to hit throughout the project. To run a successful project, these milestones should be stuck to to avoid delays. If a milestone e.g. design sign off is missed by 1/2 weeks, then the same delay would be added to the launch date.

We all know delays happen and other things come up, but communicating these issues as early as possible gives the best chance to stay as close to the original timings for the project as possible.

3. Don't Design by Committee

When it comes to any project, be it building a website or decorating a house, everyone has an opinion. The phrase 'too many cooks' comes to mind. Whilst this is great for people to take an interest, it can also be damaging to the success of a project if multiple people have to be consulted before designs can be signed off. These opinions can be contradictory or not aligned with the brand vision for the website, resulting in a design that no-one is fully happy with at the end.

At the start of the project, establish the key stakeholders who will be involved in the project and what their responsibilities are, ensuring they have enough time to dedicate to the project e.g. if you have a CEO who has final sign off on the designs, involve them in the design meetings rather than bringing them in after you have signed off the designs initially. If their opinion is valid and required for the project, have them involved much earlier so that our designers can understand their vision.

4. Don't Procrastinate

When you have your list of tasks to complete, it can initially seem overwhelming the amount that needs to be done to launch your website. The best way to combat this is to dedicate regular time to the project so that you can tick tasks off your to do list and make consistent progress. 

The worst approach would be to procrastinate and put off all the larger daunting tasks until the end of the project as this can result in late nights to complete the work and potential missed deadlines causing delays to the website launch.

Population of content onto your website is the largest task that clients underestimate and can the longest amount of time, so our advice is to start as early as possible with this task by uploading your media content into the Media Hub and consultant profiles in Vennture Recruit. 

5. Keep Focused

Building a website can be a stressful process but also exciting as you establish what you want your new website to look like, what it should say and how you can market your services to a wider audience. You may start to think of new ideas that you hadn't thought of at the start of the project and want to include these, adding more features and areas to your website. These additional features are nice to haves but can be distractions from the main work for the website. 

Our advice is to keep focused on the build of the website, the core features and functionality, and getting the website launched out to your audience. As the Vennture CMS is so flexible, you can then build out your website further or add more features in after launch, making use of the staging environment to test these before publishing out to live. This will help you to launch your website on time and to the original brief of the build.

No matter the project, our team are always here to help and want every project to be a success both for Venn and the client. If you have any queries about any aspects of our project process, contact a member of the team who will be happy to help.