Define, Diagnose, Design, Deliver and Develop: future-proofing your web presence

I used to have a colleague who constantly worried about “getting all the ducks in a row”, by which he meant, I think, knowing what the elements of the task were and tackling them in the right order.

Re-thinking and re-creating your web presence needs you to line your ducks up; not because it’s so difficult to build a functioning website, but because it’s hard to devise one that fulfils all your objectives and integrates fully into your operational structures.We’ve all experienced some of the things that can go wrong. Maybe, having spent a great deal of effort and time on planning your site and your online presence more generally, you find that something –the technology, perhaps, or the business environment - has moved on and you’re still scrabbling to keep up.  Or, despite your careful planning, you have missed one crucial component and the hoped-for results never materialise.

Planning in five dimensions

Planning your new web presence can be a long and daunting process involving a lot of discussion and negotiation with all the different departments of your organisation; and it needs an integrated, but stage-by-stage, approach sustained by a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve.

At SiftGroups we have developed a comprehensive framework for doing this thinking, and we’re happy to share it with you. You may think sounds somewhat elaborate, but we have tried to break down the job into its component parts, to help you get those ducks in a nice neat line. We realise you may well not want, or be able, to go through every stage with us; even so you may find this a valuable checklist of things to think about.

We see it broken into five major stages, though they can to some extent run concurrently:

• Define your USP
• Diagnose your assets and your needs
• Design your web brand
• Deliver your build
• Develop your skills and your ROI.

Define your USP: this is when you identify your objectives in this project – in terms of your business, your culture, your internal structures – and your unique proposition from the perspective of your customers; and use these to pinpoint the features you’ll have to get right to build a fresh web presence. The upshot of this is developing an information architecture – a navigation structure and language – that can carry all the features you have identified as your essential requirements. Some existing clients will be familiar with this stage as the suite of workshops that kicked off your project with us.

Next, though, you need to Diagnose your Assets and your Needs; to look more carefully your current situation, to consider exactly what resources you already have, and what you need to originate. This is not just a question of your content, but your communications, community and revenue streams as well. In this phase we recommend both a careful audit of your assets, and the creation of a strategy to meet the future needs, a process that ends in the setting of KPIs for your overall new web presence.

Only now can you safely move into Designing your Web Brand, updating your brand, style and language, setting out all your technical requirements in detail and planning for launch.
That stage moves seamlessly into Deliver the Build, where the software itself is built, and your chosen web technology is integrated into your other business systems like content management, intranet or customer relations software.

Finally, but crucially, comes Develop your Skills and your ROI. This means acquiring and developing all the new skills – editorial, commercial, community, communications - you have identified as vital for achieving the objectives you have set yourselves. It also means continually monitoring and measuring the performance - technical, commercial and in terms of your broader objectives for your brand - of your web presence, and adjusting your activities (and maybe upgrading your technology or skillsets) accordingly.

Develop is, of course, a never-ending story, continual adjustment and readjustment, until you decide the time is right to begin the process all over again.

It's a never-ending story

Interestingly, because this whole thing is a cycle and not an end-to-end process, you can launch into it at any stage. While some clients begin with Define, others who have already recently rebuilt their web presence may choose to start with Developing Skills. For those who choose this option we recommend simply that they become aware of the whole cycle, in order that they can see how particular skills – using Twitter, for example, or training sales staff in appropriate new ways of selling – fit into the wider picture for the whole web project for their brand.