Make no mistake, website creation is a project and a complex multi-faceted one at that...!
First and foremost, the site design demands visual and authoring skills. For best results these ‘artistic’ efforts must be fully supported by a complete set of traditional IT team tools including project management, shared document store, video conferencing, time recording/billing plus, of course, email and diary.
Website creation project – small business tools
The below diagram shows the key project support tools, plus my recommended apps for a typical small business project. See later for corporate recommendations.
Small Business’s Requirements
To guarantee success SMEs tools must deliver a short learning curve, provide basic functionality and not overwhelm the non-technical. In all cases they must support easy guest access.
Project management apps should offer schedule planning and task ownership, complete with reminders...! For the SME they must be visually intuitive and easy to use. Trello is an obvious choice as is Asana and both are in widespread use.
Document stores must offer shared access plus slick communal editing. Live links to the project store are also essential. It’s a lot easier for the site designers and clients to be 'on the same page' when they can all share and edit the same document in meetings and offline. For the SME slick and easy to use apps such as Dropbox and Google Drive fit the bill and again are in widespread use. Microsoft's OneDrive (personal and Business) 'work' but both are more 'personal' rather than 'team' solutions and not as well suited to team admin. Microsoft SharePoint is a far better option, but more suited to the needs of corporate users - see later.
Video conferencing, meeting management and slick screen sharing for site reviews and even live editing, are the key demands - Zoom and most of the mainstream players will deliver. The Trello app also supports two fully integrated meeting 'power-ups' BlueJeans and Join.Me.
Time recording and billing must be easy to use by both the designers and the accounts team. The reports and invoices must also be client friendly. An always available ‘start timer button’ (browser and desktop) is vital as is a tight two-way link to the project planner. Harvest is a good choice and includes basic project/task management, invoicing and integrates well with most planner apps - but not Microsoft’s, see later.
Email and diary must integrate with the above tools and be transparent to both the designer and clients, especially if they are using different platforms. Both Microsoft Outlook and Google G Suite easily fit the bill.
Website creation project - Corporate Tool Requirements
Corporates will. of course, wish to leverage the tools they have already standardized upon and the ones their team are already using. Here the web design agency must fit their needs. The major player is Microsoft with its Office 365 Platform and its Teams suite. This includes most of these required tools as standard and, as it’s aimed at all business from SME up, the application profiles are quite similar to those recommended above for the SME.
Above is a website creation project leveraging a typical set of corporate tools. Microsoft Planner is very similar to the likes of Asana and Trello and offers very slick and full featured links to the suites document stores, diary and meetings, complete with screen sharing and conferencing. The meeting notes wiki is also a welcome extension,
Time Recording is Microsoft's Teams biggest gap - Planner doesn't offer the feature as standard or even slickly integrate with any of the market leaders. User have been asking for time tracking for well over 4 years so hopefully it’s somewhere the apps feature burn down list, as its sorely missed...!
In closing - assemble your tool set, set-up slick links, fully brief the customer and look forward efficient website projects and most important, well satisfied clients...
ENDS