A website is always the centerpiece of your company. It represents your brand, your products and services and your core identity. Most younger companies are severely challenged with website design and deployment. In the absence of an experienced marketing executive, the projects can take the company in the wrong direction. It is not just a function of experience – many executives outside of marketing understand the key features of a well-developed website. Project management alone can kill the project or let it go in the wrong direction. There is also a need for speed. A well staffed and prioritized project for a site with less than 100 pages can certainly get done in 8 to 12 weeks.
The initiation of a website project requires you have the basic marketing infrastructure in place. This means you need branding elements (colors, logo, personality, identity, fonts), positioning and messaging (corporate, product, standard descriptors, vision, mission, etc.) and standard icons and imagery. These should flow across all of your public facing properties to include the website, collateral, public relations activity, sales tools, video, social media and more. If you don’t have these in place, external consultants focused strictly on website deployment will likely invent the pieces they need to get the project moving. They won’t be looking beyond the website deliverables. These pieces impact so much more than the website. It is quite important to have a broader view of how this will all be used.
Beyond the marketing infrastructure, you need people that will supply content. That is, share the facts on the product, the value proposition, the benefits, position against competition and so much more. These are the people that will work to supply the finished content. They will also be required to finalize the taxonomy (tree structure) of the website so that it reflects the needs of the business and your current market opportunity
On a design level, you will need a strong, experienced graphics and branding designer to do the home page layout, using the chosen colors, fonts, icons, imagery and other infrastructure components. This will go through a few iterations and this process is best managed by an experienced marketing manager that understands how the website will fit with everything else. Do you want a very modern responsive look? What are the goals of the website? Lead generation, sales cycle buyer nurturing, e-commerce transactions? The designer will need to know.
At a basic implementation level you will need a strong web implementation player working with a standard platform of choice. For a website under 200 pages (which describes the great majority of websites in the United States) you can find a single individual can often do this work well. They would work with the graphics designer and your content team to get the pieces in place. This individual will set up the development environment at your ISP and load the development framework.
Today, for most websites and low volume e-commerce websites, WordPress(r) is the platform of choice. This trend really took off about 3-5 years ago and now most marketers understand that this is the best entry point. Usually you select a template or theme, that sits on top of the standard WordPress environment. Two excellent WordPress themes are Avada(r) and Genesis(r). These themes enable you to set up user ID’s so varying people can login to the web development environment, access the blog and more. This enables your marketing, support and product management teams to login individually to tweak or add pages, and manage content. These themes also abstract most programming issues away from the users. You work with containers (squares that take up space as you layout a page) and widgets (builder elements) that enable you to place content within them. You work visually, not with code, almost all the time. You want to set your primary colors, fonts type, heading sizes and other parameters? Quickly accomplished in the theme options section.
With a small bit of training your marketing team members can later take over the website and might only need technical support for monthly backups, recovery, or complex changes that require a bit of customization to your CSS (cascading style sheets) that define the basic parameters that are configured within your chosen WordPress theme. It is critical that your marketing designates can take over the website after it is delivered. Modern themes on top of solutions like WordPress are the best way to do that.
Of course, there is a generation of web developers that are very comfortable using custom tools to build the basic code. They prefer not to work with themes and templates. They can write very efficient code, integrate custom, complex and beautiful graphics effects and do wondrous things. The only problem is that this website is not maintainable by anyone other than them! How will we add our press release next week? You will need to answer questions like these! Don’t laugh. I saw a project earlier this year which include a custom $150,000 website effort. All of it hand spun code. Not remotely maintainable from my perspective. In this scenario marketing team needs a full time contract with the web development firm to add or change any content. Everything takes too long to get done.
We’ve also seen the use of older technology templates, that perhaps are not as easy to use as some of the modern WordPress themes. Tools like Joomla (r) and Drupal(r) might not seem as powerful or capable as the modern WordPress based themes, and certainly feel a bit harder for the marketing team to use. Many of the outside consultants and marketing firms have a developer or two that has successfully used these tools and has no reason or incentive to migrate. You need to be careful. Once again, an experienced marketing executive or senior manager will generally know better and take you down the right road.
Most websites center around a brochure-ware, lead collection and fulfillment. Tells us quickly what you do, why I need it, the benefits and value, and make me feel good about you. They serve the same pages up for every visitor all the time.
In contrast, higher-end expensive websites are using new technology sets that enable you to deliver a different experience (different web pages) to someone based upon their identity or other factors you can identify when they visit your website. This is not the relatively simple dynamic technology, also called “responsive,” that serves up different code based upon platform (so that iPhones(r), Droids(r) and other mobile display properly and as does your monitor with Chrome(r)). This dynamic technology serves up different pages based upon who you are, your preferences, your history of interaction and a dozen other factors. This is powerful stuff, but only for large companies with expansive budgets that understand their customers and buying cycles in intricate and minute detail.
Of course, if you can do this, and maintain this, it will deliver higher conversion rates through your funnels. But it takes a lot of critical mass to support this. Several hundred million in revenue and a large marketing department. This technology is hard to configure and set up. Big e-commerce firms use this technology, often heavily customized or home grown, and it takes quite a bit of work and oversight to get it going. Most of the time, for an emerging company, this technology is a waste of time and energy. You are still discovering and confirming your basic value proposition and trying to build your repeatable, scalable sales cycle. And, you don’t have the marketing team to support it.
Regardless of the approach, you must have a clear path to the integrations that will become essential to your sales, business development and marketing teams. How will you integrate lead flow from a marketing automation system like Marketo(r) to your system? How will this connect and flow into Salesforce(r)? How quickly will this get done? Will we need to use a “live agent” on the website?
In terms of cost, we see the numbers all the time. Specialty web development firms are more expensive. They have a hefty layer of management and fairly significant overhead built into their cost structures. In early 2016 a website from a firm with team member titles like “producer” will generally charge about $100,000 to $150,000 for a developed and delivered website. These efforts usually create dramatic custom graphics. You are paying for many cycles of iterative graphics and layout development, even when the website is only a few dozen pages. Once again, remember they like custom code. They like being locked in for maintenance FOREVER. Heads up.
All in all, economic efficiency will be best driven by an experienced marketing executive on point. We will take on the product marketing (to create the content), have the basic marketing infrastructure identified, completed and documented, and get you to a production website on a standard platform of choice which is maintainable and easily supported by your marketing team members. We will find re-usable design elements out in the public domain which we can adapt to build your website. Remember, there is almost nothing new under the sun in terms of website design, layout and color use. The goal is to find an existing approach we like, and then adapt it to the new company’s identity. These efforts will cost far less than the $100,000 to $150,000 price tags offered by many web design firms. One of our team leads can set up the development environment, help you pull together the marketing infrastructure quickly, learn the product so they can create and drive content and then liaison with our graphics wizard to get your website moving with light speed.
We are an experienced extension to your marketing team. We share the same goals and understand of what is required, in the short term, and in the long term. We won’t short cut overall go-to-market needs to get a point project done. And, we’ll move faster to get it done and in production This Quarter, not next.
