B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Are You Living With a Sub-par Website While Waiting for Nirvana?

September 7th, 2007 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Recently, we blogged about how a poor website can seriously harm your business.  Yet we continue to encounter prospects who give us umpteen reasons why they can’t get started – just yet – on a rebuild they realize full well they must do…

“We have to have a complete interdisciplinary team to do this, but Mr. Yoo is on sabbatical and Ms. Snapple is on a 6-week project in France.”
“Our people are just too tied up until after {the Syapsis ’07 show;  year-end closing;  our worldwide sales meeting; … (choose one or more)} to write our new content.”
“We can’t even start developing our content until Satchem Associates presents our new branding.”

It all boils down to this:  they’re waiting for 100% of the resources to be available to do the absolutely perfect website re-build.  Ah… Nirvana;  if only there actually was such a place!  In the real world, it takes an unusual alignment of the planets for 100% of the resources to become available at the same time;  and absolute perfection is rarely achieved in any case.  Also, by viewing it as one giant monolithic project (we call it the “Big Bang” model), it can look too intimidating to even start on.

The 90% Solution
A much more sensible approach is to work with your Web design consultants to lay out a staged plan that doesn’t require all the resources being available all at once, and that doesn’t try to do everything at one time.  The key starting point is to lay out the new information architecture and define any “must” branding elements.  That done, your Web consultants can go ahead and develop the new design and define the navigation.  They can probably map most of the existing content into the new structure, with perhaps a bit of re-purposing by your people needed for some of it.

At this point the site can go live, and you begin reaping the traffic and lead-conversion benefit of the fresh new look and improved navigation.  And this could happen as soon as only a couple of weeks into the project!

Are we there yet??
Of course not:  some brand-new content still must be developed, and some of the older content that was initially “ported” will need revision.  But with a full-function content management system (such as eMagine’s Ez-Edit^tm), all of that can be done as time permits, in parallel, directly by the content “owners”.  It’s the same way they’ll do future updates …with no IT gurus required.

Aside from making the project actually start-able and doable, other advantages of this method are that 1) your consultants do most of the work, not your staff; and 2) you get most of the benefits very early in the project’s lifecycle.  Ask your Web consultants to show you a project plan that doesn’t require waiting for Nirvana …and that won’t tie up half your company while it unfolds.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Web Design