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INSIGHTS - August 2019

New Website? Think Strategy Prt 2: Capabilities

Welcome to today’s KND’s Connect Session, we are going to talk about the strategy of creating a new website. But Part 2, we have previously covered company, I just wanted talk today about capabilities.
Some businesses who are large who have a resource base and skill set in side their business that can create a new site, or create components of a new website, we often work with internal teams to actually develop the website but have designers in-house that do that. So today I thought I would quickly run through the resource requirements that we use in the process of creating a new website. There are quite a few people involved.

The first is a UX specialist, User Experience specialist and that’s me in our business and Chris my business partner. We look at those user flows, analyse your market from a really high level business perspective and then connect that and produce documentation and wireframes plannings. I have spoken about wireframes in previous video. But its all planning documentation. So that one role.

The next is, you would call UI or User Interface Design, and they produce the visual layer. The visual layer you would consider as a graphic designer. So, they are bringing to life the wires to create the overall brand and the feel and the colours and the imagery that’s used on the site to make it look really cool. So, at this stage, the site is coming to life, but it is still in photoshop in fixed files, there is no coding involve, and that we we go into… once you are happy with that, that’s two people involved, then we jump down into the development phase, and there is two roles here.

One is the front-end developer, the front end developer takes these visuals and turns those visuals into interactive website components, that would on very large screens down to small screens. They are very clever in coding all that so that browsers work from Chrome to Firefox. To really make those technical things work effectively. Then there’s the back end developer. Usually, they are two different people.

The back end developer connects to APIs, does all the integration with high-end functionality, adds those really… database smarts, collecting forms the technical components of the site. So that’s two people. We are up to 4, then we look at one of the most important things on the site which is copywriting.

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A lot of clients really want to do the copy themselves and in some cases absolutely has to be the case. But, quite often, you really need an external eye on this, and that copywriter might think about Search Engine Optimisation, they will know how all that works, and really position your business, connected to your brand with the right wording as well.

That’s critical!

Quite often there’s a massive handbrake in the overall project because the copywriting is done in-house in the business. So you may think you have got a resource and a capability to do copywriting, but often I would give that some solid thought are going through stages that actually, it’s worthwhile engaging a copywriter to get you over the line.

And finally I am going to go a Content Populator on the site. So they take alot of the visuals, additional images, additional resources that are required to be published on the site and get them all into the CMS. So it brings the whole thing together and we end up with a beta testing website that you can actually look at.

So there’s testing, and then go live which is done by a combination of all these. So this is a very big team work project. It’s not one person, sometimes there’s templated websites where you can skip some of the design process, but you still need to do UX, you can skip some of the development process, but you might need a dev to solve some core issues. So there are ways to compress this to being less technical, but in a big site, this would be all the skills that you would use and probably a few more people along the way.

As the site goes live, then you are also looking at SEO specialists, Ad managers and campaign content producers, video. There’s a bunch of skill sets that change for an ongoing site, but to produce a site it’s a great team effort – and this is usually pulled together by an account manager along the way, but the account manager may be one of these people, depending on the site of the business as well.

So you can see the capabilities required, it’s a whole bunch of different thought processes and team work to go into create a really great result with your new website, so give that some thought and strategise how you are going to move that with your business.

We have got some great things happening with KND soon, we are about to release some new products and services and I will announce those in the next few weeks so stand by.