- Good reasons for a site rebuild:
- Having to limit content because of limitations
- Expensive maintenance requiring a developer each time
- SEO is not a garnish you sprinkle on top. Should be baked in from the start.
- T-shaped marketer- Know a little about everything, go deep in one area
Presentation
- Get away from spreadsheets
- Use visuals to present SEO
- Use a pie chart to present keyword research. Helps people understand what content they need to focus on.
Bad, outdated process
- Common method: waterfall method. Everything goes in one direction. Significant effort to go back.
- Not a good fit with modern projects. Holdover from a time when it was a fit.
- Design must be complete before development
- Expensive if someone changes their mind after this
- Budget can be eaten up too soon because pacing isn’t set well
- Developers come in too late (after the design is done) and you learn you can’t do something in the design
- Problems don’t show up until engineering starts
- Not a great way to show a web site in a tool for static design. Can lead to revisions after the fact.
- Decision makers struggle to visualize before product complete (e.g., decision maker may not define “accordion” the same way as a developer/designer)
- Decision makers think while development is happening and old decisions can change if engineering is closed off during development
- QA takes forever and is demoralizing for everyone
What should the web site development process look like?
- Agile-ish
- Get developers involved early but not bogged down. Get feedback from developers early.
- Deliverables are presented often and early, so less time for decisions to evolve.
- They define content in GatherContent, before design or development starts. Helps copywriters get started.
- Set SEO parameters (keywords, redirects, etc.)
- Map out content (banner text, intro, primary CTA, testimonial)
- Content blocks in map have details about what they should be
- GatherContent allows content writers to fill in the content after the map is ready
- Add microcopy to fields to explain what is expected
- Now you can start building the admin and pages
- Wireframes are easier since all the content is ready
- They use Invision with CodePen prototypes for interactive elements
This ends the discovery project and starts the build process. Separate billing for each.
Design
- Broken into rounds
- Menu, home, search
- About, services
- Team members
- Makes for fewer massive revisions
- Send to development
Develop your own list of SEO technical specs
- Test with proper robots.txt
- Address canonical and paginiation (and maybe hreflang for multi-lingual sites)
- Sitemap recommendations
- What to include and omit
- Explain why headings are important and how to use
- Accessibility requirements for the location of the company
- Schema recommendations (based on complmeted content)
- 404, search pages
- Site speed
Momentum
- Keeps momentum going and gets people involved
- Open process builds trust within the team and outside with the client (internal or otherwise)
- Trust is how things get done