Planning a website
This phase is important as once your website scope has been defined, the budget, schedule and team assignment (if necessary) are all dealt with during the website planning.
Setting a Budget
Having a budget for a website is very beneficial and there is no doubt that you will have some sort of budget in mind, even if it is as vague as "I do not want to spend more than £8,000" – a budget will help to define boundaries, project size and ultimately the feasibility of your planning website.
Costs from your web designer should be based on hours. Dependent on your budget, your website designer may need to change the scope if your budget is not realistic against what you are looking for. It is important that both you and your web designer are realistic when allocating resources, time and deliverables as underestimating certain deliverables may lead to the project being late.
Tracking Time
All professional web designers track time. It is a way for them to see if they have quoted realistically for a project and also a good way to see if a project is going over budget. If your web designer does not currently track their time on your project, ask them to do so - there are many methods of tracking time including Windows and Mac OSX software, or popular web based tracking like Harvest.
Project Schedule
We have found that having a project schedule is very important to ensure that everyone is working on schedule. You should be given a project schedule to help you understand when certain deliverables are going to delivered to you for review and signoff. Without this document, there is no real way of checking progress.
A project schedule can be as detailed as required, but generally they include a deliverable, due date and party responsible. Your web designer may also give you some deliverables that you are responsible for like content or imagery.
Staging Areas
Your chosen web designer will most probably be developing your website locally (on their computer). For this reason, it is essential that you are given access to a staging area to review how the development of your new website is going. A staging area is basically used to post the website for review and signoff.
Project Kickoff
Once the above have been covered, you should be invited to see your web designer one last time before the project officially begins. This is to review the material and plan to date and ensure that everyone knows what the plan is. This meeting could be face to face or by telephone – the main aim is to ensure the kickoff meeting starts the project right.
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