Module 6 | Planning Website Design and Redesign Projects

Module Description:
This module discusses and explains planning website design and redesign projects.
Purpose of the Module:
To discuss and explain planning website design and redesign projects.
Module Outcomes:
At the end of the course, students must have learned proper planning for website design and redesign projects.

Lesson 1 | Who should be involved in a website project?

Who should be involved in a website project?
The success of a website is dependent on the range of people involved in its development, and how well they work as a
team. Typical profiles of team members follow:
·         Site sponsors. These will be senior managers who will effectively be paying for the system from their budgets. They will
understand the strategic benefits of the system and will be keen that the site is implemented successfully to achieve the
business objectives they have set.
·         Site owner. ‘ownership’ will typically be the responsibility of a marketing manager of e-commerce manager, who may
be devoted full-time to overseeing the site in a large company; it may be parr of a marketing manager’s remit in a smaller
company. In larger companies there is a separate team for desktop, mobile and tablet platform with separate team members
covering all these skills.
·         Project manager. This person is responsible for the planning and coordination of the website project. They will aim to
ensure that the site is developed within the budget and time constraints that have been agreed at the start of the project,
and that the site delivers the planned-for benefits for the company and its customers.
·         Site designer. The site designer will define the ‘look and feel’ of the site, including its styling through Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS), layout and how company brand values are transferred to the web.
·         Content developer. The content developer will write the cope for the website and convert it to a form suitable for the
site. In medium or large companies, this role may be split between marketing staff or staff from elsewhere in the
organization who write the copy and technical member of staff who converts it to the graphics and HTML documents
forming the web page and does the programming for interactive content.
·         Webmaster. This is a technical role. The webmaster is responsible for ensuring the quality of the site. This means
achieving suitable availability, speed, working links between pages and connections to company databases. In small
companies, the webmaster may also take on graphic design and content developer roles.
·         Digital experience analyst of CRO expert. Familiar with how to analyze digital analytics to identify site effectiveness and
how to run conversion rate optimization experiments.
·         Stakeholders. The impact of the website on other members of the organization should not be underestimated. Internal
staff may need to refer to some of the information on the website or use its services.
While the site sponsor and site owner will work within the company, many organizations outsource the other resources since
full-time staff cannot be justified in these roles.
We are seeing a gradual blurring between these different types of suppliers as they recruit expertise so as to deliver a ‘one-
stop shop’ or ‘full-service agency’, but they will still tend to be strongest in particular areas. Companies need to decide
whether to partner with the ‘best of breed’ in each, or to perhaps compromise and choose the one-stop shop that gives the
best balance and is most likely to achieve integration across different marketing activities – this would arguably be the new
media agency, or perhaps a traditional marketing agency that has an established new media division. Which approach do
you think is best?
Observation of the practice of outsourcing suggests that two conflicting patterns are evident:
·         Outside-in. A company often starts using new digital marketing technologies by outsourcing some activities where
there is insufficient in-house expertise. The company then builds up skills internally to manage these areas as digital
marketing becomes an important contributor to the business. An outside-in approach will probably be driven by the need to
reduce costs of outsourcing, poor delivery of services by the supplier or simple a need to concentrate resources for a
strategic core competence in-house.
·         Inside-out. A company starts to implement digital marketing using existing resources within the IT department and
marketing department in conjunction with recruitment of digital media specialists. They may then find that there are
problems in developing a site that meets customers’ needs or in building traffic to the site. At this point, they may turn to
outsourcing to solve the problems.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive and an outside-in approach may be used for some activities, such as SEO or
content development, while an inside-out approach is used for other functions such as site promotion.

Lesson 2 | Prototyping and Agile Software Development

Note
This lesson is retrieved from Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and
Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Prototyping
Prototypes are trial version of an entire website or part of the site being refined that are gradually refined through an
iterative process to become closer to the final version. Initial prototypes or ‘mockups’ may simple be paper prototypes or so
storyboards, perhaps of a ‘wireframe’ or screen layout.
A wireframe is a simplified outline of a single-page template used to define new layout of functionality for part of a website
for discussion, iteration and then a brief for implementation.
Finally, working prototypes will be produced as HTML code is developed. The idea is that the design agency or development
team and the marketing staff who commissioned the work can review and comment on prototypes, and changes can then
be made to the site to incorporate these comments. Prototyping should result in a more effective final site which can be
developed more rapidly than a more traditional approach with a long period of requirements determination. 
Each iteration of the prototype typically passes through the stages which are:
1.      Discovery or analysis. Understanding the requirements of the audience of the site and the requirements of the business,
defined by business and marketing strategy (and comments input from previous prototypes).
2.      Design. Specifying different features of the site that will fulfil the requirements of the users and business as identified
during analysis.
3.      Develop. The creation of the web pages and the dynamic content of the website.
4.      Test and review. Structured checks are conducted to ensure that different aspects of the site meet the original
requirements and work correctly.

 Agile Software Development

Recently, the concept of growth hacking has developed as a way of supporting the profitable growth of business through
using an agile approach. Andrew Chen (2012), an entrepreneur who is an advisor and investor to many startups, describes a
growth hacker as follows in his post Is the Growth hacker the New VIP Marketing?
Growth hackers are a hybrid marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of ‘How do I get customers for my
product?’ and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they
layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modelling via spreadsheets,
and a lot of database queries.
This quote shows that many of the features such as a focus on testing and learning through conversion rate optimization
(CRO) are not new; it shows a change in mindset in how business transformation can be achieved. Another key feature of
growth hacking is applying techniques for how to achieve viral growth through encouraging users to share their experience.
Today encouraging sharing through social sign-on and social sharing is more an approach sought by growth hackers. These
techniques have helped companies like LinkedIn grow from 13 million to 175 million users according to Schranz (2012), who
explained the Facebook’s growth team started by establishing a simple framework of things to measure and improve to
make it easier for everyone to understand what to focus on and why it matters:
·         Acquisition – Get people in front of your product.
·         Activation  – Provide a great initial experience.
·         Engagement  – Keep people engaged, deliver value.
·         Virality  – get people to recommend your product.
Some of the principles of growth hacking are being adopted by existing businesses, looking to enhance the sales from their
digital channels.

Suggested Reading:
Agile 101. (2021). Retrieved from Agile Alliance: https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/
Source:
Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom:
Pearson Education Limited.