Andy Jaeger social media and social change

How to build a website

The sense of relief and the fizzling away of tension that comes with launching a long project almost makes the whole thing worthwhile. And this web development project has been long. I got deeply involved in the project when it had been going for a year and it was stuck. Eight months later, we're live.

The website was developed for the Nursing and Midwifery Council, and I took a lead role in the information architecture, concepts and overall look and feel, as well as ensuring that my team, who will be responsible for it in the long term, took a lead role in content migration. Given the significant changes in IA, migration wasn't a straight transfer, but in many cases a total rewrite. And, now we're live, the whole thing is my baby to look after. Or beast to tame, depending on your point of view.

Just a few days since go live may be too soon to reflect properly on the project, but, based on my experience, here are my top ten tips for anyone embarking on a web development project for a large organisation:

1. Be clear about what you want to achieve

For anyone familiar with Prince2 project management, I'm not talking about having a good project charter. It's about having a coherent vision of where you're going and what it will look like when you do. There are no right or wrong answers to how you achieve that, but basically everyone involved in the project needs to be able to tell the same story. Frankly, we wasted some time at the beginning because it took a while to come to that share view of the world.

2. Get, and maintain, buy-in

In a world of stakeholders, everyone has something to say. Those opinions are fairly easy to capture at the start of the project, but if you are doing anything that's going to take any time at all, those people are going to change. For reasons that are too dull to go in to, this web development project lived through four chief executives. Maintaining buy-in was a significant challenge.

3. Put together the right team

Even a relatively simple website needs a range of specialist skills. Specialist skills come attached to people who might or might not get along, but the project won't work unless people see eye to eye. We were fortunate in having a team of people working for the project who (most of the time) got on, respected each others' opinions and worked well together.

4. Don't be a slave to project methodology

Understanding how to fill in the paperwork that goes with Prince2 doesn't make you a good project manager. It makes you good a filling in paperwork. Most importantly, you need to...

5. Get the right project manager

Ideally, this person will be obsessive in their devotion to getting the project delivered.  Again, as with the project team, we were very lucky to find someone who could deliver.

6. Learn to compromise

I didn't get everything I wanted out of the website development. I still have a long list of things to do at some point. But by focusing on what we needed, rather than what I wanted, we got a new website. Compromise is a good thing.

7. Learn not to compromise

Compromise is also a bad thing. There's a fine line between having a vision and being stubborn, and I hope I stayed on the right side of that line. Most of the time.

8. Don't design by committee

In fact, don't do anything by committee. Participation is a good thing, and it has its place when you are pulling together ideas. But if at any point you think you might need to do something quickly (and you will), work out in advance who gets to decide what. It will save you from a world of endless meetings.

9. Nurture your talent

A project is a good opportunity to do things for the first time. If I have one big regret about the way the project worked out, it's that we didn't capitalise more on those opportunities, by giving key team members more of a chance to try things out.

10. Expect it to go wrong

Goes without saying really. But most of all, expect it all to go spectacularly wrong at the last minute, and make sure you have a good back out plan if it does. We didn't need ours in the end. But you never know.