Review: A Practical Guide to Managing Web Projects

An informative and practical guide to successfully managing website and web app projects. It’s clearly based on firsthand experience with many projects. It’s a bit dry; it’s not as engaging or entertaining as it could’ve been.

I found it well worth reading, because I spend a lot of time managing website projects in my web design agency, OptimWise. I read it because I saw the founder of another web agency reading it. Following are my notes.

Requirements sorting: Write stakeholder objectives on index cards. Give colored dot stickers to everyone (build-side and client-side). Let each person add up to three dots to each idea, where more dots indicates greater importance. Sort objectives accordingly.

Stakeholder interviews

1. What are your responsibilities?
2. From the customer’s perspective, what would success look like?
3. What financial goals do you personally hope the website will achieve?
4. How will your internal processes change if this project succeeds?
5. How do you hope the work and skills of you and your team will change for the better after the site goes live?
6. Just hypothetically, what would complete failure look like?
7. Anything else?

Methods

• look at the websites of competitors
• conduct web surveys
• look at other published research (books, websites and market surveys)

“[T]hink about putting the largest part of your time and money into an old-fashioned technique: asking people what they think, one-on-one.”

Ask interview subjects about how they feel about their daily tasks as they’re accomplished. These emotional states can tell you how a process can be improved, or how an online tool can help.

Ask about competitors. “Ask about the subject’s experience of your client’s brand. Ask about what comes to mind when they think about leaders in the industry. Ask general questions about what websites they consider to be easy or hard to use, useful or useless.”

Rank info based on user preference, not client preference. For example, about us content isn’t important for most users.

“If you start at the page level to present your designs, clients may feel that they don’t have enough choices to make. Starting with smaller textual or visual modules will make it easier to elicit the feedback that you need. Present the full pages once the overall visual direction has been established. This way you’ll only spend the time building one set of pages, not three.”

“Rather than starting with the big visual elements on the page [masthead, navigation, footer], begin the visual design and the page build with the fundamental unit of content.” This is different for different sites – “a magazine site might be about the article text, and a travel site might be about the booking detail. … make the fundamental content unit easy to use and attractive in the page. Build the sidebars and footers and call-outs in relation to the fundamental content.”