about our website makes you feel good?" This is a nice, open-ended closing question that lets people end on a positive note and gives you feedback on what their emotional response is to your website. People tend to make decisions based on emotion and this will help you understand how your online presence is currently making them feel.
Notice that these questions avoid any kind of specific structural items about website navigation, what should be on the home page, and so forth. Specific structural decisions should be left to the design and usability experts creating the site and/or through card sorting (which we will discuss later).
What people say and what people do are often quite different so it's important to focus on high-level content-driven questions. This will encourage your constituents to avoid getting caught up "in the weeds" of site structure and instead focus on how they truly interact with your website.
2. Keep the Project in the Hands of Marketing - Not IT
“If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.” - Bradley's Bromide
First things first: who is in charge of the project? I’ll give you a hint: it’s marketing. That was easy, wasn’t it?
As I work with companies to create or update their new websites, I frequently encounter a misconception that I find puzzling. It seems that many companies are of the mindset that their IT departments should be 100% in charge of their websites. Not so… in fact, Marketing should be the group overseeing or at least very involved in the corporate website. Most IT departments are overworked as a result of supporting infrastructure and workstations and don’t have the time to devote attention to the company website nor should they take on all these responsibilities.
The old-fashioned way of building websites did involve getting messy with custom code and building custom “back end” interfaces and also involved hosting sites in-house. Today, however, there is no reason (with a few exceptions) for companies to build, host, and maintain websites in-house. Modern websites should be built on a content management system or application framework that removes the need for custom coding and messy development. When we design and deploy web sites at SpinWeb, we focus on the marketing and business development aspects of the site, rather than the technology. The technology should operate seamlessly in the background, leaving us free to be creative and focus on business goals.
This means that IT really should not be the only group with a role in the design, deployment, or management of the web site. Today’s modern tools allow the marketing team to handle all these activities with ease. This leaves IT free to provide better support for systems that is within the scope of their training. Everybody wins.
Are there exceptions? Absolutely. At SpinWeb we recently deployed a new web site for a prominent local credit union and we were working directly with the IT team and it was a very successful project. This was because the IT team saw the value of outsourcing the technology related to the website and opening up control to Marketing, thus providing better service. When this is the goal, it’s a win-win for everyone. I would say that in this case, the IT team was wearing a partial Marketing and Communications hat during the project, in addition to IT responsibilities.
Remember that a website is a marketing and communications tool – typically not an IT project.
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