Viper Marketing

Best Way to Think About Your Website

Author: Jim Hardcastle

Jim has helped organisations and groups communicate more effectively for nearly 20 years. His background in the countryside and rural sectors provide him with a wealth of experience. Fueled by coffee with Post-Its at the ready, he’s here to help .

• It has a specific set of tasks to perform, writing a job spec for your website is no bad idea!
• It needs a development plan if it is to continue to perform at its best
• It needs regular updates to stay current – like a training plan
• It relies on input from various other team members to do its job
• Not everyone will like it all of the time

A website has a permanent, full time, role in your business:
You wouldn’t recruit someone and think that, once they’d signed the contract, their job was complete or that they’d stay exactly the same as the day they walked through the door. You shouldn’t think the same of your website.

A person comes to your company with some skills and knowledge, but over time they will gain more specific knowledge about your company, and become more skilled as they learn on the job or undergo formal training and development. A website is just the same – however well conceived and delivered, it is only when real people start to interact with it that you’ll know what really works, and what doesn’t, on your site. Through reviewing analytics and undertaking user testing and feedback, you will be able to constantly refine and improve your website’s performance. Which brings me to performance… you’re likely to set of minimum performance standards for your staff, have you done the same for your website? And, do you have the tools to measure against those standards.

And of course, things change. Think also of a scenario in which your employee’s area of the business is subject to some sort of change (legal, environmental, new product, etc.) – they’ll need to adapt and respond. Your website is no different. Just because it was beautiful when you launched it, it may not be in a new context. What’s more, this is technology we’re talking about. The tech big boys work to a circa 6 month product development cycle – the pace of change is fast and furious. If your website is to stay current, you’ll need to keep an eye out for the new trends, like Twitter, Tag Clouds, etc… and whatever is just around the corner.

But, it many ways it is even better than an employee.

• It never sleeps
• It doesn’t take holiday.
• It won’t sue you if you change its role or replace it with a new one

Useful people management techniques you can apply to your website:

• Write it a job specSet a basic salary (hosting, support, regular updates)
• Set a commission plan (invest a percentage of the revenue it delivers back into traffic generation and improvements)
• Have a weekly one-to-one (update content, check stats)
• Conduct a monthly review (stats, performance targets, etc)
• Conduct a quarterly appraisal – consider a 360 appraisal where you get feedback from all usersSet a ‘training’ budget – essential updates, spring cleaning, new features.

- Posted on Wednesday 02 Sep 2009 at 02:18 by Jim Hardcastle

Tags: analytic (1), development (13), digital (38), people management (1), performance standards (1), product development cycle (2), tag clouds (1), training (36), twitter (24), website (35)