Every company has one, but too few are happy with their website.
As an organisation that has been producing premium websites for the past 7-8 years this comes as no surprise because creating a ‘passable’ website is easy, and there are a lot of agencies out there that will take your money.
In our view no client aims to launch a ‘passable’ website. But the problem is not theirs, the problem is most web agencies are set up and run by web developers. These guys are great at building websites but tend to be not-so-great at understanding the commercial needs and aims of your website.
Without a good project director who is able to bridge the gap between commercial understanding and web production, problems will appear. Listed below are the top five problems that we hear about, usually just after the web agency team has disappeared over the horizon…
Problem 1 – Lacking of planning
The design looks great but no one has helped you organise your commercial messages and then mapped them out as a site structure and wireframes. As a result the site becomes difficult to navigate as there is no obvious flow to the information on the page or sign-posting to key outcomes.
Problem 2 – The site ages quickly
The agency, with all its developers and designers, has made your site look beautiful at launch but they have not made any effort on how you, the client, will keep the website looking up-to-date. This leaves clients the choice of having to hack around a user-unfriendly interface or pay the agency for every update.
Problem 3 – No traffic
Too often websites are designed and built without any thought given to where the website traffic is coming from. Months are lost trying to reverse engineer search and email marketing into the build when it would have been easy to plan it from the start.
Problem 4 – User Acceptance Testing
A modern website must work for the individual customer, delivering a quality experience to them, on their terms. The problem is that almost all agencies design and build websites to suit them, seeing themselves as the customer and forgetting to properly research who will be the people to interact with the finished website. Customer research is vital to any major project upfront, at design stage, at build, at launch and on-going.
Problem 5 – Integration
The website is built in isolation from the organisation’s business and marketing effort. Yet the customer does not differentiate between your website, notification emails, marketing emails, reminders, social media communications, invoices, etc. As far as the customer is concerned they should all come from the same place and be consistent, so a website needs to be integrated with your social media, your CRM, your accountancy package and your email service.
Unfortunately it is rarely the case that clients we help have just one of these ailments, more often we diagnose all five.
To avoid these problems and deliver a quality website, Crush Design has always approached every project as a team of three disciplines in-house. Firstly, an experienced website project director to help the client make good commercial and technical decisions from the start and throughout the project. Next we team up a specialist UX designer and a developer to own the project as a pair so that the website designs work with the build at every level.
If you are planning a website project, or know some who is, then please put Crush Design forward. We have a track record for delivering great website after great website, be it for a large national clients, an online retailer or a smaller consultant.
To see our portfolio of work, or to discuss any digital project, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Jonathan at Crush Design.