How to know if you’re ready to start your new website project

Written by

Tash Hockey

When taking on a new project for a client, we have a guide to show the types of things that need to be ready for us to complete the project in as timely a manner as possible. We thought we’d share this resource to help teams get ready for their upcoming web projects, so they can achieve what they need and work with their creative partners in a smooth and streamlined way.

TLDR: Here’s a guide for charities and non-profits to use when starting a new website project to help them make it as streamlined as possible

Getting the most out of your web project

If you’re about to embark on a new website project, it’s really important that you ensure your team is aligned on the goals and outcomes they’ll be working towards.

We’re not expecting our clients to have dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘T’; however, we believe that to make sure your project runs as smoothly as possible, it’s crucial to bring all of your stakeholders onboard and establish internal cohesion. Ultimately, this will help to save you time, money and team capacity, something we all want to promote.

While whatever agency you’re working with are doing the majority of the heavy lifting in facilitating your web project, there’s still a lot for clients to be aware of. We’re going to go into a bit more detail and lay these out for you, so your web project has the best start.

Understand your ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’

To help you get ready for your new website project, it’s a good idea to look at a few reasons why you wish to take it on in the first place. Below are some questions you might want to ask to establish your ‘who,’ ‘what’ and ‘why,’ and build your project ethos around those.

Who is your audience?

You may already have a keen sense of this, but it’s worth spending time studying your audiences to find out who they are. What have they come to your website to do? What would you like them to do when they arrive on your site? Are there any particular avenues you want to direct them down, e.g. to make donations or raise awareness of your cause?

If you’re able to do so, you could start making a document with some profiles of the types of people that make up your audience and discover some things about them, for example:

How did they get to your website? (e.g. referral link, social media, email newsletter, an ad etc)
What have they come to your site to do? (e.g. gain knowledge/information, donate or fundraise on your behalf, find out how to contact you)
What are their demographics? (e.g. age, location, social status)
Have they come across any issues when using your current site? (e.g. struggling to find information they’re looking for, couldn’t complete a task because of a broken link or feature)

All of these details will help you to build a robust idea of what your audiences require from your new website, if the current one isn’t fulfilling their needs.

As part of our discovery workshops, we work directly with you to gain more into how your service users are interacting with your current website, and what you want from the one you wish to build to facilitate their needs. When beginning the project, we also undertake user research to really understand your audience, and to either validate or challenge any current assumptions about them.

What does your new website need to achieve?

Think about your organisation’s purpose and offering: what does your website have to do in order to achieve those goals? Do you need to highlight your organisation’s work and the benefits it brings to your service users? Perhaps you want to highlight your fundraising or show opportunities on how to build community through events that support your outreach?

This is the perfect time to meet the requirements of your organisation, while also providing for the needs of your audiences: both your service users and those you want to attract to potentially create awareness around and raise funds for your cause. Have conversations internally, and with those your website serves externally, to see how you can facilitate both.

Our discovery phase assists us in uncovering exactly this – it’s really useful for us to spend some time at the beginning of a project diving into this aspect to build an understanding of what you need from your website.

Why do you need a new website?

Take a look at your existing website and ask yourself: “What is it about this new website that no longer serves us?” Have you had any comments or complaints from your users about it? Does it not include a particular feature that you’d like to offer? Perhaps the user experience or interface isn’t as engaging or user friendly as it could be? It may be that your current site no longer fits the wider strategy of your organisation.

These are the sort of things you need to consider when planning your new website – the agency you work with will be able to make suggestions for features and changes they think would improve things, but only you will be aware of all of its positive and negative aspects.

Have you ever heard your employees say they’re a little embarrassed to direct people to your website? We’ve come across clients feeling this way a number of times before, but it’s something we can certainly help with.

What are the key things we need you to have (at least) thought of?

When you start looking for an agency and putting together your project brief, these are the main things we think you should consider:

Your internal capacity

Are you going to be able to respond quickly to any queries raised by the external agency you’re hiring to create your new website?
Have you thought about who in your team will work on the website project? You’ll need to ask someone to be a point of contact for the agency you choose to work with, someone to create and upload content, and who you require to sign off on key aspects of the project.
If you don’t have capacity (or the expertise) to create your content in-house, we can suggest a freelancer to assist with this, if your budget has the scope to do so.
If your team consists of just yourself, you should decide if you have the time and capacity right now to be able to do the above. If you don’t, you might leave your agency team waiting – e.g. for content, responses to queries etc. This will ultimately lead to delays in your project being completed and have a cost to you, whether in time or money.
It’s worth having an internal project management meeting to demonstrate what work will be taking place, bring other team members and stakeholders in, and let them know where their capacity may be required to undertake tasks or sign things off. Some of these things might not become apparent until you’ve gone through a discovery phase and worked with your chosen agency to put together your website’s specifications. Keep your team up to date with any requirements you may have for them and when they might be needed.

Branding and brand guidelines

When was the last time you did a review of your branding? Is it still fit for purpose? Are you and your team still adhering to your brand guidelines correctly?
If you think your branding no longer fits your needs, you’ll want to look at this, either as its own sub-project before you commission your new web project, or as part of it. It’s essential to be happy with your brand before starting your web design project, as it’ll have a major impact on the website’s design, it’ll impact the timings, and can also become a blocker to progress.

Content

Web designers worth their salt will be using a content-first approach, which means they’ll need your actual content (or an approximation as close to the final, signed off content as you can manage) to be able to design your website effectively.
What content (e.g. copy, images, links) will you need to populate your website?
Is it signed off by all stakeholders and ready to be sent to your chosen agency?

Asset sharing and creation

How will you share assets with your chosen agency?
Do you own them or have permission to use them in this way and/or share them with an external party?
If you haven’t got the assets you need, who will you get to create them? Do you have the budget for a freelancer to do so, if you haven’t got anyone in house who can? Your chosen agency can also suggest stock images from sites, such as iStock and Unsplash, if that’s within your budget.
To keep your project running to time, you should starting prepping all the assets you’ll need for the site ready to provide to your chosen agency at the appropriate time.

Team alignment

Have you onboarded your team for the project? Do they know what the key outcomes of the website will be? While it’s best to assign key points of contact for the agency to work directly with, it’s likely that many members of your team will be needed for things like content and asset creation, signing off on areas of (or the whole) website, and even just information sharing.
Does the project align with your overall brand strategy and goals?
We do some deeper work on this in our discovery workshops, as well, but it’s a good starting point to all be on the same page and in agreement about what your website needs to achieve.

Budget

Do you have a budget allocated to this project and is it ready to go when you need to pay deposits to your chosen agency? Make sure you’re aware if the budget covers VAT or not, and let the agency know this upfront.
This is something you should have an idea of before beginning to look for an agency. Some will be able to work within a budget you have, but bear in mind that this may limit the scope of the project.

We’re very aware that, even with the best will in the world, it can be difficult and time consuming to lock down exact details like these, but having them in place ready to go when you start looking for agencies means you’ll be setting your project up to run in a streamlined and cost-effective way.

Another thing that has a big impact on a project is being able to stick to a project plan and its timings. This works both ways, for both an agency and their clients: if a client hasn’t got their content ready prior to beginning the work, it can have ramifications on how quickly the project will progress.

Something else to consider…

While you’re putting the above things in place, you’ll also want to make sure that your project brief is clear, particularly in terms of what you wish to achieve. This is the document that’ll guide the agency to create your website specification later on.

Having the brief lay out exactly what you want from the project – such as changes to the website you already have, new features you’d like to add, or the starting point for a completely new site – will assist the agency you’re working with to submit a comprehensive proposal offer to you. It should also include your budget and any specific deadlines or outcomes you need to work to.

Hopefully this guide gives you a good grounding to get ready for your next website project. We’d love to discover how we can help you take your ideas to the next level – why not book in a call with us to see what we can do for you?