How to develop and launch an effective Digital Project

Identify Business Goals

"When building a website the focus is often on making something aesthetically pleasing, forgetting that the real purpose is to achieve business' online goals."

The above is, I feel, is the most important thing to remember when beginning the design and build of any website and it is something I often overlooked at the beginning of my career. I imagine @10Yetis will testify to the amount of times I dragged my heels when asked to change (what I thought was) a beautiful design in order accommodate less aesthetically pleasing features.

This is why every project should begin with a well thought out strategy developed with all of the relevant stakeholders. If it is a new website ask the stakeholders "What do you expect the website to achieve", if it is a re-design of an existing website - "What do you think needs to be improved on from the existing site". This stage of your research should enable you to set out clear and tangible targets that need to be achieved by the final product.

Provide solutions

This is the culmination of all the hard work done during the first stage. It's at this point that you can provide solutions to all of the goals you set out during the discovery phase of the project. For example, you may have identified that on the clients existing site that the bounce rate was particularly high and think there should be much clearer call to actions on the new site.

Provide Mock-ups & Wireframes

This is the real 'first deliverable' and a really crucial stage of the project. At 10 Yetis Digital we like this stage to take place face to face. This is purely because it's always easier to gauge a clients thoughts and feelings about a design in person.

At this stage we will typically be delivering a few different designs, each design will have a 'Desktop' and 'Mobile' version so the client can see what the work will look like across several devices. There is usually some back and forth at this stage, this is brilliant and is to be expected. Once the client is happy with a particular direction we can move onto the next stage.

Front End Development

Next up is where the development team really take a lead on the project. The client at this stage will be happy with the look of the wireframes however there is nothing like seeing the product in the wild. At this point the client will also be able to see all of the tiny interactions that make a website but cannot be seen on static mock ups such as hover effects element transitions.

Back End Development

Now the site has been built statically we (may) need to integrate it with a CMS (Content Management System). If you have created a small brochure type site you may not need to do this however for most of the sites I have created in my career the client has needed ongoing management and content creation for the site meaning a CMS will make things much quicker in the long run.

The CMS you use is of personal preference but it should be taken into account the CMS is for the client to use moving forward and therefore should be easy to use, manage and even update if you are not going to be providing future web support. For us, Wordpress, ticks all of these boxes and is often our go to solution for clients who do not require custom CMS builds.

Content & SEO Review

This is it, you have a fully functioning website which looks and functions fantastically now you need to fill it with great content. At this stage it may be us adding the content or the client, either way it is our job as the owners of the web project to ensure it is high quality, relevant content. It cannot be stressed enough that 'Content is King' when it comes to marketing the website moving forward and any successful web project will need to have engaging and valuable content from the outset.

If the project is a re-design this is the stage to also identify any redirects that will be needed from the old URL structure. This area could be a whole new blog post for another day but here at 10 Yetis when redesigning this current site we migrated all of the old blogs onto our new CMS, identified all existing inbound links and ensured we redirected the links to the most relevant page on the new site as appropriate.

Client Sign Off & Launch

The site should, by now, be hosted on a staging server (with a robots.txt disallowing crawling) which can be accessed by the client and reviewed. There will probably be little changes which will require you to revisit all of the previous few stages on the project but this is important and to be expected. Once everyone is happy with the site it's time to launch and fortunately not the end of the journey. The web is evolving all of the time and this means your web projects should be evolving with it. Ensure you are committed to each project moving forward, this means you can provide support to the client should they require it.

Below is small checklist of things (no particular order) I always check before final launch:

High Level Tech Stuff

• Check the ownership of domain names.
• Check the DNS are propagating correctly.
• Check the server set up and ensure all modules are correctly installed. E.g - apache, PHP, MySQl.
• Back up the current site
• Will an SSL certificate be required ? If so source and install one on the server.

SEO & Content

• Ensure all 301 redirects are working
• Full content review for spelling, grammar and punctuation
• Create both HTML & XML Sitemaps. If the content is dynamic the sitemaps should be too! After they are created submit them!
• Title Tags and Meta Data should be included, relevant and unique on every page.
• Open Graph data is not necessarily crucial however the sharing of your content on Social Media will most definitely be improved if you include these tags.
• Full link review to ensure all internal links are working.

Site Performance -There are several online tools to test site speed. I use Google Page Speed.

• Compress any images on the site and ensure they are sized appropriately
• Minify HTML,CSS, JS
• Cache resources. You can cache HTML, CSS, JS and images. This will improve site speed significantly.

General Overview

• 404 Page - make sure you have a nice custom 404 page to help users navigate even when a broken link has been clicked. Self brag - http://10yetis.co.uk/404
• Compatibility - Check your website renders well on all browsers and devices. This does not mean shrink the window on your desktop. You should actively be using the site on different devices. I use ghostlabs
• Analytics code has been inserted on the website
• Forms submit data as appropriate
• Share icons are working properly