2 Key People Every Website Project Needs
You have worked hard for the past few years and your business has grown considerably. You evaluate your marketing needs and realize you need to rebuild your website. You look around to find the right contractor or agency to do the work. After weeks of searching, meetings, and proposals you feel you found the right person. Weeks go by and throughout the process, you become frustrated, tired, and annoyed. The project just does not turn out the way you wanted it to. The likelihood is that you were missing one of the two key people that would have made the website a success.
Disclaimer
Likely, the best websites you have seen have involved more than just two people. Typically, great websites include entire branding exercises that span 2-3 weeks, content writing, design, and development… not to mention iteration as time goes on. This involves many different specialists for each aspect.
Although, if you are a smaller business and want to do things on a budget, there are two key people you should make sure your project has.
Person 1: The Designer
Sometimes my customers send me marketing quotes they received from agencies and ask me why the cost of the projects are so different. If the scope of work for both projects are similar, it typically comes down to the fact that the designer and developer of the project are the same people.
To find a person that can do both design and development is like asking your Chief Financial Officer to run the HR office as well. It is extremely difficult because these jobs require completely different skillsets and use different parts of the brain. So, what ends up happening, is a business ends up with a templated website that is tweaked to fit their brand instead of something built for them.
A great designer can take a brand and, using their experience, creative knowledge, and design best practices, come up with something spectacular. I have yet to do a project where no designer is involved and end up with a totally unique website. Thus, having this person on your project is table stakes to compete and stand out against your competition.
Person 2: The Developer
This one is obvious. If you do not have a developer that can build the website for you then you just do not have a website at all. However, I wanted to highlight this because there is a difference in skillset amongst developers.
Many people can call themselves a developer but may not have the skillset required to complete a project. When hiring a developer, depending on your project, you want to ensure they can write code from scratch such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. The reason this matter is that you will not end up with a developer who uses builders like Wix and Squarespace to develop your website. These platforms are not great to grow your business in the long term. You also so not want a developer that uses plugins to add things that would just take a couple of lines of code, thus creating more attack surfaces for hackers on your website.
A great developer will make your website fast, responsive, and scalable which is a noteworthy investment as well.
To summarize, having these two people within your project will ensure a much higher success rate. As your expectations go up, more specialists should be involved. As a Marketing Specialist that connects businesses with the right marketing agencies, I ensure that I set expectations for every project and ensure my customers have the right people involved.
