The management of web projects is very special because it calls for as much rigor as creativity. This collection of project management advice is empirically design and therefore aims to transmit to you the best practices to know before you start as well as the mistakes to avoid absolutely.
SUMMARY
What is a web project?
A web project refers to a design project for a website, an e-commerce store, a marketplace, or a public web application. The concept of design encompasses technical creation, but also the management of content, data, design (in the graphic sense) as well as all marketing dimensions.
The peculiarities of web project management
A web project is often the extension of a more or less important part of the activity of a company or an organization on the Internet. Consequently, all of the company’s internal businesses are represent in a compact and synthetic manner (sales, communication, marketing, support, legal, HR, etc.). It is this multifaceted set that makes the singularity of such a project. It involves interweaving all the business components (by involving the managers) in a perfectly integrate way (thanks to the supervision of a project manager). Here is the detail of these features for the 4 main types of Web projects:
Creation of a website
A classic website often takes the form of a showcase site (corporate), a blog, a press site, or an institutional site. A website must meet the following requirements:
- Participating elements to convey the brand image (logo, graphic charter, photos, baseline, value proposition, etc.)
- A flawless user experience (UX) on all fix and mobile devices
- Optimize natural referencing and perfect compatibility with social networks
Approximate duration of the project: 1 week (for about twenty pages)
Examples: elysee.fr, wikipedia.org, leblogdeneroli.com
Tools for creating a website: a CMS like WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal
Creation of an e-commerce site
An e-commerce site refers to a single-seller online store. Single-seller sites have become scarce since the emergence of marketplaces like Amazon or Cdiscount. However, they remain for brands that enjoy a strong reputation. An e-commerce site must meet the following requirements:
- An efficient information system: catalog, price list, inventory management, order logistics, payment, delivery
- Optimize natural referencing
- A flawless user experience (UX) on all fix and mobile devices
Approximate duration of the project: 3 months
Examples: nike.com, apple.com, dell.com
Tools for creating an e-commerce site: Prestashop, Magento, New Oxatis
Creation of a Marketplace
Marketplaces (or Marketplace) are multi-seller e-commerce platforms. They allow many sellers to offer their products on a merchant site with a large audience. They are characterize by:
- An efficient information system: catalog, price list, inventory management, order logistics, payment, delivery,
- Optimize natural referencing,
- A very wide choice of products.
Approximate duration of the project: from 6 months for a marketplace in SaaS mode to several years for a specific development
Examples: darty.com, cdiscount.com, amazon.fr
Tools for creating a marketplace: Wizaplace, Izberg , Kreezalid
Creating a web application
The Internet is changing more and more towards Web applications (or Web Apps) design mostly in JavaScript: Intranet, Extranet, Wiki, CSR (corporate social network), comparators, online services. They offer a lot of features compare to a content site: search, comparison, selection, sharing, saving, etc.
- A relevant user experience
- Excellent technical performance
- Notoriety
Approximate duration of the project: from 6 months to several years depending on the complexity
Examples: appvizer.fr, lesfurets.com, impots.gouv.fr, Intranet or Extranet
Tools: specific development
The stages of web project management
1. The expression of need
A Web project necessarily involves an expression of needs that is materialize by specifications. The specifications are a document that describes point by point the functionalities, the business, and possibly the expect technical prerequisites. It will be use to study the feasibility of the project, challenge certain elements, and costs. Creating models, even simplistic ones, makes it possible to quickly and unambiguously understand the expect result.
2. The constitution of the team
Managing a project is only possible with a well-coordinate team. Once the scope of the project has been defining, you must call on an IT services company, a Web agency, and/or an internal team to carry out the project. This team will be able to assess upstream the effort require to complete the project (time and budget). A typical team for a web project is made up of developers, a UX designer, a product owner or a project manager, and business representatives (for the expression of needs).
3. Costing and planning
Costing consists of cutting a project into small pieces to assess the overall cost. In the case of a Web project, it is necessary to quantify the effort to elaborate all the following points:
- IT developments (Back Office and Front Office),
- Technical tasks (hosting, security, backup),
- Graphics and interface design,
- Content (texts, articles, brand content, white paper),
- Marketing material (landing pages, visit tracking).
Once the team is aware of the scope of the project and the effort, it can plan the production of the five axes above. To do this, the features are split into tickets and then plan. In IT, the agile method proposes to work in sprints (a series of 2 weeks of production separate by a schedule). Planning generally takes the form of a roadmap in the form of a Gantt chart, list, or Kanban.
4. The design
Design (or production) is the phase where team members must coordinate to ensure the creation of the site, application, or marketplace:
- Choice of the domain name and web hosting,
- Site development (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.) or CMS configuration,
- Writing and integration of content and media,
- Creation of visuals and integration of the user interface,
- Integration of web marketing scripts (Google Analytics for example),
- Integration of web marketing tools (newsletter subscription, landing page).
5. Receipt
The acceptance phase allows the project manager or the Product Owner (PO) to test the entire site or platform to validate its compliance with the expect result. Steps 4 and 5 are repeat in an iterative process until the final product is satisfactory.
6. Going into production and launching
As soon as the iterative phase is stop, the site, platform, or Web App is put online. However, the web project has not achieve its goal at this stage: a web project achieves its goal when it meets its audience. Several options are available to the project manager and the marketing teams to ensure a good launch:
- E-marketing and e-reputation plan,
- Communication on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin),
- Press relations campaign (PR),
- Guest blogging on relevant sites,
- Writing content to improve natural referencing,
- Emailing campaign,
- CPC campaign (AdWords),
- Offline Marketing (paperweight, posters, exhibitions, etc.).
9 tips for a successful web project
Anyone who has ever been heavily involve in a digital project will tell you that while the method is essential, so is the experience. This is why we offer you 9 tips to do well (and especially to avoid the most common mistakes).
1. Align web strategy with company strategy
Isolating a Web project from the company’s strategy condemns it to failure, because it is, as we have seen previously, the extension of the company’s strategy. It is, therefore, necessary to define the platform’s objectives from that of the company. Here are some questions to frame the marketing strategy:
- What are the objectives of the site?
- Who are the competitors?
- How powerful are the competitors? (Trust Flow, Domain Authority)
- What are the opportunities and threats?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses (skills to write good content, for example)?
- Do we have the means to achieve the objectives?
Once the strategy is choose, it is a question of sticking to it: the tactic changes in frustration, the strategy changes in suffering.
Here are some perfect collaborative project management tools for a web project: Asana , Wimi , Wrike
2. Skills, a team, a culture
Here are the different skills require for a site redesign as well as the corresponding web professions:
Skills | Job |
Project management (MOA), project management, project management | Project Manager, Technical Project Manager, Product Owner, Project Director, Assistant Project Manager, IT Project Manager, Product Manager |
Legal compliance (CGV, CGU, RGPD, legal notices, confidentiality) | Business lawyer, lawyer, DPO (Data Protection Officer) |
Graphics, infographics, graphic charter | Graphic Designer, Web Designer |
Webdesign, UX, UI, Ergonomics | Ergonomist, UX Designer, Web Designer |
Web communication plan, e-reputation | Communication manager |
Web writing, Videos | Copywriter, Blogger, Influencer |
Web development, Project management (MOE) | Web Developer (or web agency), PHP Developer, CTO |
Digital Marketing / webmarketing | Traffic Manager, Webmarketing Manager, SEO, SEO Expert |
Competition on the internet has become fierce. To carry out a web project, it is therefore essential to have a complementary and experience team . The whole team must also share the same culture of the web project to accelerate the development of the site.
3. Do less to do better
An IT project is very often underestimate and almost systematically drifts. This is why it is essential to plan the design of a true MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test the heart of the project before embarking on a project that is too large and potentially catastrophic if the project were to evolve.
Mistake to avoid | advice |
Develop great features that turn out to be unnecessary | Design an MVP, test it and then gradually develop it towards the desire product. |
Write a lot of unoriginal content | Write little inspiring content, correctly mesh and arrange in the headings of a logical tree structure. |
Duplicate and adapt the T & Cs / T & Cs of other sites | Progressively bring yourself into compliance with the help of a lawyer. |
Put action buttons everywhere | Think about the user experience and put highly visible CTAs only in relevant places. |
4. Plan the project realistically
Optimism is a quality in everyday life and a bad habit in project management. It is also not good to be pessimistic. The art of good project management is base on creating a good framework so that everyone can make the right decisions and adjust the project if necessary.
The precise costing of human effort makes it possible to carry out back-planning (Gantt chart for example) allowing all stakeholders to become aware of the dimension of the project.
5. Choose an effective project management method
Depending on the type of project, there are different interesting project management methods :
- Traditional methods: Waterfall, critical path,
- PMI / PMBOK methodology,
- Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming),
- Adaptive methodologies: Event Chain, Extreme Project Management.
In web project management, it is the Agile Scrum method that is most often use. It is in phase with the startup/web culture, those of developers, and corresponds well to the life cycle of a web platform.
6. Seeing the facts rather than assuming them
It is within everyone’s reach to collect data on the use of a site, platform or web application. Getting them to talk in a dashboard isn’t much more difficult and has a big advantage: Data tells facts whereas humans can only make guesses. This avoids interventions like: “I’m sure users will love it”. To turn this assumption into fact, it is necessary to look at the time spent on the pages, to see the bounce rate as well as the events and conversions.
Allow two working days for the development of a report in Google Analytics offering a global vision of the activity on the site.
7. Be creative
Creativity is inseparable from any project site design because it is the main driver of innovation. However, innovation is essential to create and maintain a competitive advantage.
To stimulate the creativity of a team, it is important to create time for reflection ( brainstorming ) isolate from any pressure or stress relate to the project. The Design Thinking approach is also very interesting to achieve this goal by combining analytical thinking with intuitive team thinking.
8. Take a little risk and try a lot
In general, web marketing, UX Design, and IT developments follow very pragmatic logic. It is therefore useless to reinvent the wheel or to attempt leaps into the unknown when it comes to performing well-proven methods. Almost all web projects that take risks on things that have never been test end up in failure. Only companies with large financial capacities can recover from this type of error without difficulty.
However, this should not slow down marketing, functional and graphic tests involving little risk (time and financial). It is even strongly recommend to test small marketing budgets on new advertising channels and to do A / B testing on features, visuals or landing pages for example. This makes it possible to optimize uses, conversions or income.
9. Control your communication
Whether internal (within the project team and the company) or external (customers, users, followers, readers, etc.), communication is vital because it will permanently fix the perception of the project in the spirit of third parties. Here are the critical communication points to be address in web project management:
- Internal:
- Main milestones of the project,
- Early delivery delays and advances,
- Project progress,
- Important changes and their reasons,
- External :
- Launch date (only when it is certain),
- Site or product value proposition and baseline,
- Invitation to webinars.