At WebDevStudios, our digital strategy team and project management office (PMO) take the responsibility of planning and organizing off your plate, just as a travel agent or guide would when planning your adventure. We partner alongside you, the client, to map out your website project. We uncover your site’s needs, create a detailed plan, help keep it on track, and ensure it reaches completion within your budget and on time.

Digital Strategy

We view digital strategy as the process to uncover the real goals and objectives of your website in order to make a detailed project plan. We pose questions like:

• What will the site look like?
• How will it function?
• What’s the timeline?
• How much will it cost?

Quite often, answers to questions like these provide the team with the right information to build out your project.

Project Management

Project management (PM) is the guide that helps the project follow the plan from execution to completion. We leverage not only our skills and experience but use PM processes and methodologies to get your web project to the finish line; meeting the agreed acceptance criteria, keeping it within budget and launching according to your deadlines.

Project Life Cycle

It all starts with a signed contract. The digital strategy team, along with your own team, will hold many collaborative calls; poking and prodding to find the true goals of the website. They want to understand the audience, the functionality, the look, etc. From here they build out a detailed plan and timeline.

The digital strategy team then meets with the PM of the project and those engineers that are building the site. They call this the ‘internal handoff,’ but don’t think this is where strategy steps away. They are around until the project is complete.

The PM on your project then watches closely; checking the work against the project plan, making sure the team stays on track and doesn’t get derailed. When questions come up during the build, the digital strategy team is right there with details on how it should work.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.

-Benjamin Franklin

Skipping the Process

What happens if you don’t want to use digital strategy and project management in your website project? Well, just imagine going on that trip mentioned at the beginning of this post without a plan. Would you find all the sites without a map? Unlikely. Would you find all the sights within your timeline out there? Probably not. Would you overspend? I bet!

Same goes for embarking on a website project. We all want to just start a project and get the perfect product. Without the proper planning of both digital strategy and project management, you will quickly find yourself constantly fixing things to meet your expectations, which ultimately costs time and money.

For example…

You want a simple block, logo, menu item that wasn’t originally planned for. Now, you have to find a place on your website for this new item.

It’s not just a matter of dropping it wherever. You have to bring in a designer, look at the placement, and maybe even move other features, have a call or two, develop it, and get approval from stake holders. Any change that takes place after the planning process can have a domino effect and push the timeline or require more resources, which ultimately costs you more money.

Every website project needs both digital strategy and project management.

Both digital strategy and project management are so incredibly important for any website project. We draft out what you really need and help keep the project from derailing. We ultimately are your biggest advocates and want to see your project succeed.

Need a team with an excellent strategy and project management team to help build your next website? Work with us!

The post Digital Strategy and Project Management: Your Website Project Needs Both appeared first on WebDevStudios.

1. What will your website look like?
2. How will your website work?
3. How long will it take to build?
4. How much does it cost?

Answering these questions and defining the scope of work requires:

• An understanding of the needs and requirements for the project
• A series of meetings with the WDS digital strategy team
• Documentation of a fully realized list of ideas, features, and requirements
• A precise review of mock-ups provided to ensure all potential scenarios for every user type have been accounted for
• A plan that targets your timeline and budget
• A prioritization of the deliverables to ensure a smooth development and release process

WebDevStudios Digital Strategy Team

Identify Requirements

The first step of our digital strategy team is to understand your website project goals, the success criteria of your project, as well as the current state of things in your current environment. We’ll do this through a series of collaborative meetings with you over a specified period of time.

Example Client Goals

• An increase in newsletter subscribers.
• Improvement and reworking of the user experience
• Take newly-created website designs and turn them into a working website
• Push website data to a CRM

During the strategy process, our aim is to uncover things you might not think to consider.

Example Questions We Ask

• What does your website’s content hierarchy look like?
• When a user lands on a specific page, what do you want them to do?
• How will users on your site interact with a particular element?
• Do you have multiple user types, and do they each have unique ways of interacting with the website?
• How are specific elements managed on the backend by your administrators and editors?

We also do a deep dive into the actual functionality and technology requirements for your site. For example:

• Third-party API connections for passing or obtaining user data
• Support for eCommerce either onsite or through third parties
• Custom forms
• Business process automation
• CRM integrations

Our goal is to exhaust all questions that could be asked in order to bring us to our next step of defining solutions.

Define Solutions

In the world of technology, there is not always just one way to accomplish something. Once we have identified the goals and requirements for your website project, we can begin to determine how we’ll meet those goals and explore the different paths to meeting them.

The intention of defining solutions is not to choose the first opportunity. Instead, it is to find all opportunities and weigh them against the timeline and budget so that we can make the most educated recommendation. The solutions presented by our digital strategy team are based on our strong technical experience, especially in the WordPress space, and use the most innovative tools and technology.

Recommend Approach

No two projects are the same; so, it is not as simple as defining a single set of tools and workflows for every project. The technologies used to complete those projects may differ as we tailor our recommendations to each individual project.

Our recommended approach will be a combination of a focus on project goals, the timeline that needs to be met, and the budget allocated for the project. The details of the deliverables will vary per project but will always be delivered as a project plan. The project plan is a comprehensive document containing all of the low-level and high-level requirements for the project.

What a Project Plan Includes

• Design(s), if needed
• Documented functionality requirements
• Documented user experience for that functionality
• Recommended third-party tools, if needed
• Research and feedback for existing functionality
• Plan for launching
• Timeline for completion, including phases
• Budget requirements

The intention of our digital strategy team is to strip away all possibilities of vague or unclear language around development requirements, so that both of our teams are set up for success. Once the project plan is complete and approved by the client, it will serve as the guide for our engineering team to take the next steps for development kickoff.

When you are ready to start your next website project with WDS and strategize website goals, requirements, and user experience, contact us! We can’t wait for you to meet our extraordinary digital strategy team.

The post Why Digital Strategy Is an Important Part of Your Website Project appeared first on WebDevStudios.