How to Project Plan Essential Roles for Your Website Redesign
Redesigning your website is no minor undertaking — and before you get started, it’s important to get the right people in the right roles for the project.
Important note: In a corporate setting, this rarely happens automatically! Staffing a website redesign is a preliminary project in and of itself!
Having the right people involved from the get-go can mean the difference between a slow and painful process with a poor outcome and a smooth, fast-tracked project with amazing results.
So, save big time later by taking the small time up front to project plan the right team for a smooth and successful website redesign.
How to Project Plan Roles for a Website Redesign
Get Professional Support
When it comes to redesigning your website, you’re likely far too close to your own brand and business to make objective decisions. Don’t worry, it’s not just you. It’s normal to need an outside perspective.
Don’t get us wrong, your expertise about your organization is extremely valuable. However, that same familiarity blinds businesses to the needs of the masses — the ones who’ll be visiting your site.
Unless your business is web design itself — and you have an in-house team of branding professionals, UX experts, visual designers, developers, and marketing gurus — we recommend working with a specialized web development agency to bring your brand and messaging project to the next level.
That way, you focus on what you do best — your products and services — and let your outside partner focus on what they do best — designing expert, consumer-minded sites for success.
Determine Who Should Be Involved
Who to Include Internally
The key internal roles to involve in your website redesign project plan include:
1. Founder or Similar
You need someone who knows your brand and brand goals inside and out. Ideally, this is a founder, but any longtime member of the company with a deep working knowledge of its core values will fit the bill.
2. Big-Picture Person
Next, include someone who knows the organization’s overall competitive strategy and understands what role the website redesign project plays in the company’s objectives. This should be someone high enough up in the organization to have a big-picture view.
3. Head of Marketing or Similar
Add someone with an in-depth understanding of your customers and their behavior. This is typically the head of marketing. At a minimum, they should be a prominent member of your marketing team with broad design experience.
4. Project Leader
This person both manages the project internally and serves as the single point of contact within your company for the project. This centralized communication ensures all messages between your company and your agency partner are clear and consistent, leaving no room for misinterpretation on either end.
Who to Look for Externally
A great external partner will have a depth and breadth of expertise in web design and communications. You’ll want to be careful who you work with, so check out our post on what to look for when picking an agency partner.
Most specifically, seek out a team with these roles:
1. Business Strategy Expert
Beyond the internal team assembled above, it’s equally important that your agency partner understands your business strategy and objectives. They must be capable of driving these through the web redesign process on a daily basis.
2. User Experience (UX) Designer
This person knows how to translate your business strategy into a web product. They’ll be the one to design an online experience for your customers — one that’s easy to use and ultimately results in converting visitors into customers. Learn more about the importance of user experience design here.
3. Visual Designer
This person brings the experience design to life, creating visuals in line with your brand and building an emotional connection that resonates with your audience.
4. Development Team
This is rather self-explanatory, but it’s a vital project role. You need a dev team supporting your project that will build something both functional — adhering to the designed experience — and stable, reliable, and scalable as your business grows.
5. Analytics Guru
This role is often forgotten, but it’s important. You need someone who can thoroughly think through your analytics strategy, not just plop in the Google Analytics tracking code and call it a day. You define which metrics mean success for your website, and they make sure those specific metrics are easily trackable through your analytics platform.
6. Strong QA Team
Finally, make sure your agency partner has someone focused on testing for user quality. Your site needs to work across a myriad of browsers, devices, and situations, so quality assurance (QA) is key.
Project Plan Roles for Website Redesign Success
If you take the time to project plan an internal and external team like this, you put your website redesign on the fast track to great engagement, increased conversions, and business success!
