Web project management: 9 tips to follow and mistakes to avoid

Web project management is very special, because it requires both rigour and creativity. This compendium of project management advice has been compiled on an empirical basis, and is designed to give you the best practices to be aware of before you start, as well as the mistakes to be avoided at all costs.
CONTENTS

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What is a web project?

A web project refers to the design of a website, an e-commerce shop, a marketplace or a public web application. The concept of design encompasses not only technical creation, but also the management of content, data, design (in the graphic sense) and all marketing aspects.

The particularities of web project management

A web project is often the extension of a more or less significant part of a company's or organisation' s activity onto the Internet. As a result, all of the company's internal professions are represented in a compact and synthetic way (sales, communication, marketing, support, legal, HR, etc.). It is this multi-faceted approach that makes such a project unique. It involves interweaving all the business components (by involving the managers) in a perfectly integrated way (thanks to the supervision of a project manager). Here are the details of these particularities for the 4 main types of Web projects:

Creation of a website

A classic website often takes the form of a showcase (corporate) site , a blog, a press site or an institutional site. A website must meet the following requirements:

1. Elements that help to convey the brand image (logo, graphic charter, photos, baseline, value proposition, etc.)
2. An impeccable user experience (UX) on all fixed and mobile devices
3. Optimised natural referencing and perfect compatibility with social networks

Approximate project duration: 1 week (for around twenty pages)
Examples: elysee.fr, wikipedia.org, leblogdeneroli.com
Tools for creating a website: a CMS such as Wordpress, Joomla! or Drupal

Creating an e-commerce site

An e-commerce site refers to a single-seller online shop. Single-seller sites have become increasingly rare since the emergence of marketplaces such as Amazon and Cdiscount. However, they still exist for brands with a strong reputation. An e-commerce site must meet the following requirements:

1. An efficient information system: catalogue, price list, stock management, order logistics, payment, delivery, etc.
2. Optimised natural referencing
3. An impeccable user experience (UX) on all fixed and mobile devices.

Approximate project duration: 3 months
Examples: nike.com, apple.com, dell.com
Tools for creating an e-commerce site: Prestashop, Magento, New Oxatis

Creating a Marketplace

Marketplaces are multi-seller e-commerce platforms. They enable a large number of sellers to offer their products on a merchant site with a large audience. They are characterised by :

1. An efficient information system: catalogue, price list, stock management, order logistics, payment, delivery,
2. Optimised natural referencing,
3. A very wide choice of products.

Approximate project duration: from 6 months for a marketplace in SaaS mode to several years for a specific development.
Examples: darty.com, cdiscount.com, amazon.fr
Tools for creating a marketplace: Wizaplace, Izberg, Kreezalid

Creating a Web application

The Internet is increasingly moving towards Web applications (or Web Apps), most of which are designed in JavaScript: Intranet, Extranet, Wiki, RSE (corporate social network), comparators, online services. They offer many features compared to a content site: search, compare, select, share, save, etc.

1. A relevant user experience
2. Excellent technical performance
3. Notoriety

Approximate project duration: 6 months to several years, depending on complexity
Examples: appvizer.fr, lesfurets.com, impots.gouv.fr, Intranet or Extranet
Tools: specific development

The stages of web project management

1. Expressing your needs

A web project necessarily begins with an expression of requirements, which takes the form of a specification. The specification is a document that describes, point by point, the functionalities, the business and possibly the technical prerequisites expected. It will be used to study the feasibility of the project, to challenge certain elements and for the costing. Creating mock-ups, even simplistic ones, allows you to understand the expected result quickly and unambiguously.

2. Building the team

Managing a project is only possible with a well-coordinated team. Once the scope of the project has been defined, you need to call on an IT services company, a Web agency and/or an in-house team to carry out the project. This team will be able to assess in advance the effort required to complete the project (time and budget). A typical web project team is made up of developers, a UX designer, a product owner or project manager and business representatives (for the expression of need).

3. Costing and planning

Costing consists of breaking a project down into smaller pieces to assess the overall cost. In the case of a web project, it is necessary to put a figure on the effort required to develop all the following points:

• IT development (Back Office and Front Office),
• Technical tasks (hosting, security, back-up),
• Graphics and interface design,
• Content (texts, articles, brand content, white papers),
• Marketing material (landing pages, visitor tracking).

Once the team is aware of the scope of the project and the effort involved, it can plan the production of the above five areas. To do this, the functionalities are broken down into tickets and then scheduled. In IT, the agile method proposes working in sprints (series of 2 weeks of production separated by a schedule). Planning generally takes the form of a roadmap in the form of a Gantt diagram, list or Kanban.

4. Design

Design (or production) is the phase when the team members must coordinate to ensure the creation of the site, application or marketplace:

• Choice of domain name and web hosting,
• Development of the site (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.) or configuration of the CMS,
• Writing and integrating content and media,
• Creation of visuals and integration of the user interface,
• Integration of webmarketing scripts (e.g. Google Analytics),
• Integration of webmarketing tools (newsletter subscription, landing page).

5. Acceptance

The acceptance phase enables the project manager or Product Owner (PO) to test the entire site or platform to check that it conforms to the expected result. Steps 4 and 5 are repeated in an iterative process until the final product is satisfactory.

6. Production and launch

As soon as the iterative phase has been completed, the site, platform or Web App goes live. However, the web project has not achieved its objective at this stage: a web project achieves its goal when it reaches its audience. There are several options available to the project manager and marketing teams to ensure a successful launch:

• E-marketing plan and e-reputation,
• Communication on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin),
• Press relations (PR) campaign,
• Guest blogging on relevant websites,
• Content writing to improve natural referencing,
• Email campaigns,
• CPC campaign (AdWords),
• Offline marketing (print media, posters, trade fairs, etc.).

9 tips for a successful web project

Anyone who has ever been heavily involved in a digital project will tell you that while method is essential, experience is just as important. That's why we've come up with 9 tips on how to get it right (and above all how to avoid the most common mistakes).

1. Align your web strategy with your corporate strategy

Isolating a web project from the company's strategy dooms it to failure, because, as we saw earlier, the project is an extension of the company's strategy. It is therefore necessary to define the platform's objectives on the basis of the company's strategy. Here are a few questions to help you frame your marketing strategy:

• What are the site's objectives?
• Who are the competitors?
• How strong are the competitors? (Trust Flow, Domain Authority)
• What are the opportunities and threats?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses (skills for writing good content, for example)?
• Do we have the resources to achieve our objectives?

Once the strategy has been chosen, it's a question of sticking to it: tactics change when you're frustrated, strategy changes when you're suffering.
Here are a few collaborative project management tools that are perfect for a web project: Asana, Wimi, Wrike...

2. Skills, a team, a culture

Here are the different skills required for a website redesign and the corresponding web professions:

Competition on the internet has become fierce. To successfully complete a web project, it is essential to have a complementary and experienced team. The whole team must also share the same web project culture to speed up the development of the site.

3. Do less to do better

An IT project is very often underestimated and drifts almost systematically. That's why it's essential to plan the design of a real MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test the core of the project before embarking on a project that is too big and potentially catastrophic if the project evolves.

4. Plan the project realistically

Optimism is a quality in everyday life and a bad habit in project management. Nor is it good to be pessimistic. The art of good project management lies in creating a good frame of reference so that everyone can make the right decisions and adjust the project if necessary.
Accurately quantifying the human effort involved makes it possible to draw up a retro-planning schedule (a Gantt chart, for example), so that all the stakeholders are aware of the scale of the project.

5. Choosing an effective project management method

Depending on the type of project, there are various interesting project management methods:

• Traditional methods: Waterfall, critical path,
• PMI/PMBOK methodology,
• Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming),
• Adaptive methodologies: Event Chain, Extreme Project Management.

In Web project management, the Agile Scrum method is used most often. It is in phase with the startup/web culture, those of developers and corresponds well to the life cycle of a web platform.

6. Find the facts rather than assume them

Anyone can collect data on the use of a website, platform or web application. Getting them to talk in a dashboard is not much more difficult and offers a major advantage: data relates facts whereas human beings can only make suppositions. This avoids "I'm sure users will love it" interventions. To turn this assumption into a fact, you need to look at the time spent on pages, the bounce rate, events and conversions.
It will take two days to compile a report in Google Analytics that gives an overall view of activity on the site.

7. Be creative

Creativity is inseparable from any site design project, as it is the main driver of innovation. Innovation is essential for creating and maintaining a competitive advantage.
To stimulate a team's creativity, it is important to create time for brainstorming, isolated from any pressure or stress linked to the project. The Design Thinking approach is also a very interesting way of achieving this objective, by combining analytical thinking with the intuitive thinking of a team.

8. Take few risks and try many things

Generally speaking, web marketing, UX Design and IT development follow a very pragmatic logic. So there's no point in reinventing the wheel or attempting leaps into the unknown when the point is to execute tried and tested methods properly. Almost all Web projects that take risks with things that have never been tried and tested end in failure. Only companies with substantial financial resources can recover from this type of mistake without difficulty.

However, this should not put the brakes on marketing, functional and graphic tests that involve little risk (time and financial). It is even highly recommended to test small marketing budgets on new advertising channels and to carry out A/B testing on functionalities, visuals or landing pages, for example. This allows you to optimise usage, conversions and revenue.

9. Control your communication

Whether internal (within the project team and the company) or external (customers, users, followers, readers, etc.), communication is vital because it will permanently fix the perception of the project in the minds of third parties. Here are the critical communication points to address in web project management:

• Internal :
  • Main project milestones,
  • Anticipated delays and delivery advances,
  • Project progress,
  • Major changes and the reasons for them,
• External :
  • Launch date (only when certain),
  • Value proposition of the site or product and baseline,
  • Invitation to webinars.

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Improve your web project management

Web project management is extremely stimulating, because it calls on a large number of professions to produce a highly synthesised end product. The creativity of the parties involved in the project helps to create a digital experience that is very different from a traditional project. This balance between rigour and creativity requires working with experienced and complementary people, using an adapted methodology such as Agile Scrum.

Collaborative management tools such as Asana can also enhance the efficiency of project monitoring to produce quality deliverables without any drift. Finally, the web is tending to become industrialised and to demand a higher level of quality at every level: fewer, better-written articles, fewer, better-indexed pages, fewer, better-thought-out functionalities.