BT Tower - nothing gets built without management (Photo by M Steer. All rights reserved.)
This is the first part of a series of posts detailing how Redcentaur manages web design projects for its clients. In this post is an overview of the five stages we use to develop web sites. Detail will be provided in future posts that link each of these stages together.
While steps used within these stages may vary widely from project to project, and depend largely on what is involved in each project, the stages themselves generally remain the same. This is because they are fairly generic in nature. However, do not underestimate the importance of good project management skills: they can save you and your clients money, time and unnecessary effort. Vandelay Design has identified 10 other basic principles for projects in the excellent post, Guide to finishing projects on time, which supports this series of posts quite neatly.
The one most important factor for project management is communication.
No project management post would be complete without mentioning the one most important factor for project management: communication. It is essential for any well-executed project for the project manager to talk to the client, the design team, the development team and anyone else involved in the project. If there are relatively few people involved, this becomes easier, but it is essential that the client and the team working on the website are in communication.
Here are the five stages of project management, as used by Redcentaur:
- Inception: This is about gathering all of the information that will enable you to understand and define the brief, scope and specification with the client. This is probably one of the most important stages to get absolutely right as misunderstanding or misinterpretation at this stage will cause the rest of the project to go awry. This stage should also be used to start building some concepts and principles, drafts and sketches of ideas. Start building a plan of how the project should be carried forward. Make sure that you understand how your client wants to use the site and how their customers/visitors are going to be using the site; are these two requirements compatible?
- Design: Building on the brief and scope that has already been defined, this stage is where you evolve your ideas and present them to the client. You might have several variations to begin with and with the client decide on a favoured option. During the design stage, you should also have a clear idea for information management, data storage and content management. Make sure you consider the site’s users – who are they and what will they expect to be able to do on the site; make sure you make it simple and easy to navigate, purchase or convert clicks to cash throughout the design.
- Construction: This is where you start getting your hands dirty with some coding and implement the agreed site design. By the end of this stage, you should have an almost-ready-to-go web site for approval by the client that is based on the designs they have agreed. You will need to build any backend functionality, content management systems, databases, etc. and integrate them into the site. Everything should be tested, tested again and tested to make sure the testing was correct! The more you test at this stage, the easier it will be to reach completion and handover without a headache. By the way, testing might be a good idea!
- Completion: This is where you do some user testing of site on testing server to ensure that user feedback is completed. Reassess and tweek the design, data management, etc. where there are concerns. Assuming you have completed user assessments throughout, you should at this stage make sure that users see the site and use it as expected: ask people to go through certain tasks on the site to make sure that they understand how to do what you want them to do without difficulty or obstacles.
- Close out: Uploading the completed site to the production servers, final on-line testing on the production server, hand-over to the client and completion of any search engine submissions, etc.
Gateway: meeting with clients to go through main ideas and agree principles and design ideas to take forward.
Gateway: agreeing with client the final mock-ups, design elements and data management systems/design.
Gateway: internal testing of integrated design on test servers to ensure the design works as intended.
Gateway: test with the clients to ensure they are happy with the finished design, ensuring any minor tweeks are resolved and approval is given.
Each of these stages will be described in more detail in future posts that will form a series on project management. The second part is already available, How to write a successful brief.
Discussion
I am sure that other designers use other methodologies and stages to manage their projects. I would be interested in hearing about them. Leave a comment below, with your views on how you manage projects, or how useful you have found this post.
Related posts:
- The web design process
This is part 2 of the 5 Stages of Project Management series, which covers how to develop a Project Management methodology easily for any web or graphic design process. This post covers the issues to handle as part of the Design stage and how to develop concepts to present to a client....
- How to write a successful brief
Web design projects are only ever successful if two things can be achieved at the same time: your client is satisfied with your work; and you have been adequately paid for the work you have done. To achieve both of these, it is essential for you to have a clear understanding of what your client wants to achieve. One of the ways I do this is to set out exactly what the client wants to achieve from their web site and the reasons for it in a Creative Brief....
4 Comments
hi’, i will be very glad if you can help me with the reasons why projects must go through these five stages
Alin
I would be interested to hear how you approach such clients to request payment for the additional time? Or is it one of those things that you put down to a loss?
Many thanks for the comment, really good to hear things can go wrong the world over!
In my contract I have a clause that says the priced in the contract is not accurate and that it can vary by 30% in these conditions, the clients modifies the strategy (future development) that means an increase of at most 30%, if the client doesn’t want a part of the strategy (like SEO) it can be lowered at maximum of 30% eather way these are the terms, I’m trying always to give my clients a discount of 10% on that price if they give feedback rapidly, or make the payments earlier than the contracts states, but these are long shots in small firms.
Love the post.
) )you get through stage 2, have the agreement on the final mock-up, make a contract with the mock-up attached and the strategy firmed, then you get to step 4 and then… the client brings you back to step 1:
In other countries (like I don’t know, Romania
“I don’t like the colors” or “it’s not animated enough”
so you go again in to a brief and try to explain that the price was made from the mock-up, that you have to rebuild everything from almost scratch, and so on, this happens for about 2 weeks, and then.. he says, ah it costs more? let’s leave it like you said, you’re the designer
But 2 weeks gone wasted because they still can’t get the main idea, maybe is me, who knows?
Okay this happens with small firms who like to think they are your only clients and you need to build a statue for them.
With big companies you don’t get to step 3 unless the mock-up is perfect witch I think is the best way.
Anyway, keep up the good posts.
One Trackback
[...] Skip to content About the blogComments policyRedcentaur web and print servicesContact me « 5 Stages of project management How to create a twitter background [...]