By Need
Improve Your Website
The first step to improving your website is recognizing that websites require continual improvement to be effective. Many organizations fall into a pattern of neglect. It’s all too easy to fall behind or forget and then go through long periods of inattention or inactivity in between site revisions. We can help you regain the edge and deliver a successful and manageable web strategy for your organization.
What are the issues?
Not attracting visitors and getting conversions is simply not acceptable. There are two major issues that most often contribute to reduced website performance or effectiveness – a lack of resources and/or a lack of strategy.
Lack of (Correct) Resources
We hear frustration from organizations that have a roadmap for website improvement but fail to execute because they don’t have the resources needed. Attracting and retaining the right people is increasingly difficult. Organizations that do have it figured out are putting all their eggs in one basket. It’s a common fallacy that one person, what we call a unicorn, can do all the things required to manage a website. From strategy to backend, frontend, content, and engineering. In these situations, organizations are trusting that things are being done right without real oversight.
Lack of Strategy
Things change quickly online – from user behaviors to technologies and to people and politics within your own organization. Sometimes everyone doesn’t agree within an organization and a lack of consensus prevents a good strategy from emerging. Whatever the factors are, the result is a negative impact on the organization.
How can we help?
Our services are focused around every aspect of website improvement. That might mean a full redesign, but sometimes it’s just a matter of committing the right resources to continually evaluate and improve your existing site. There are lots of ways we can engage and we pride ourselves on being flexible.
Below are the most common starting points for most clients:
You know exactly what you need.
You’ve spent a good deal of time with your stakeholders and have developed a plan for the next phase or two of your website. That’s great – we can help you execute your vision. Chances are, we can make your vision even better. We’ve never found a situation where a client didn’t say, “wow, some of your suggestions really made a big difference.” Let’s start with your plan, and if we see an opportunity to suggest some things we’ve learned from experience, we’ll do that along the way.
You want some guidance.
You’d be surprised what a good conversation can do. We can help build consensus in your organization. We can help make the case for an appropriate budget. We can validate your ideas. We can provide research that informs decisions. When we’re done with all the discussion and planning, we can execute the plan. It’s a wonderful feeling when both our teams are engaged, amped up and building momentum.
Process
How do we achieve repeatable results on every project? We approach all projects with purpose. We use research to understand who the audience is and what their needs are. We then craft architecture and user experience that makes the website as useful as it is elegant and effortless. Our job is to make the complex appear simple and challenge you to focus on your audience and what matters to them, not what matters to you.
This process represents an ongoing cycle of planning and delivery that yields consistent results for all types of organizations. Our goal is to become part of your team so we work together to achieve success.
Blending your business goals, your clients’ needs, and our web expertise to create the best strategy
Creating a visual and technical designs as planning for development
Bringing the strategy and plan to life using development best practices
Successfully making changes to your live website, both new website cutovers and ongoing feature releases
Carrying forth your love of our progress into web/application management and new features
Expertise
We’ve been doing this for a while – well over 20 years. We’ve delivered hundreds and hundreds of successful projects – countless flawless releases. Every project and relationship helps us refine our process, so we continue to evolve with new technologies and methods. Within our team we have all of the expertise needed to support your website improvement initiative. From full redesign to incremental improvement.
- Strategists and analysts
- Designers and usability/user experience (UX) experts
- Front-end developers
- Software developers
- Quality assurance (QA) experts
- Hosting engineers
- Digital project managers
How Stable is Your Website?
- Do you keep and audit regular backups of your data and/or content?
- Is the code for your website stored in a secure repository?
- Do you have a policy governing updates for the CMS, plugins, and/or code libraries?
- How frequently are there problems with making multiple code changes and code getting overwritten?
- Are your deployments automated or does someone manually push (FTP) code?
- Do you maintain development, staging, and production versions of your website?
- Do you regularly scan for performance, security, and accessibility problems?