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 Why Web projects Can Stall and How to get them out of the Gate::ExtremeMarkover Update : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Why Web Projects Can Stall and How to get them out of the Gate : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you’ve been following along with the ExtremeMarkover initiative for awhile then you may have asked yourself why the delay in getting this project through to completion.

To that end, the title of today’s post is “why Web projects can stall and how to get them out of the gate”. Before I get into the detail, let’s revisit the primary objectives of the goals of the ExtremeMarkover initiative. The primary goals of the ExtremeMarkover initiative include:

*Supporting the non-profit community with a website makeover.
*Documenting the project with an educational perspective for what we hope will be to the benefit of the profession, students studying web design, those that teach. I’m also hopeful that in turn that we can educate the customers we serve as well.

The title seems of today’s post seems appropriate enough because the project to Markover the Community Voices website was delayed. Also, the vast majority of IT projects fail. In fact, 86% by some estimates and we want to avoid that here.

As an FYI, and in the interest of education, this particular project was delayed because a lack of communication and understanding. For example,

* As the project lead, I didn’t know that the current Community Voices website is hosted on Intuits “Homestead” template base and as a result of know one telling me I couldn’t access files on the server
* Some basic assumptions were made on my part that my co lead knew the topic well enough to give me the heads up that I couldn’t access the site by FTP

The end result was not being to post Analytics code that ultimately delayed the project for months.

To support the conversation, I’ve called on the support of Jeri A Hastava, Independent We professional from Leap of Faith Web Design Cloverdale, CA.

Jeri is familiar with the ExtremeMarkover and the goals of the initiative. For the benefits of the subscribers and for those following along I asked Jeri to respond to the situation and if this ever happen to her and what did she did about it? <

Leslie shares her time, expertise and thoughts regarding the ExtremeMarkover.org initiative.

A full transcript will follow in twenty four hours.

The following comments represent solicited feedback from the Web professional community participating as Extreme Markover Committee Members and Advisers. The goal of soliciting the feedback from the committee is to use a design and development guide for those agreeing to participate as volunteers.

From Lance Loveday, CEO Closed Loop Marketing

My initial site review:

Analytics
- Implement Google Analytics ASAP – even before the redesign, as gathering some baseline data in that tool prior to the redesign will make the Before/After analysis go much smoother. It’s easy, free and extremely powerful. We recommend all clients install it, even if they’re already using another analytics system as well.
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Design
- The first impression is very poor, contributing to what I expect are very high bounce rates for the site. Installing Google Analytics would make this easy to validate.
- Start over from scratch. Incremental changes aren’t going to be enough to address the myriad design, coding, and IA issues in play here.

Messaging
- What does this organization do? It’s there, but it takes some work on the users’ part to figure it out – and many people just won’t make the effort. It’s also unclear what the purpose of the site is. Provide information, an opportunity to interact with the organization, donate…?

Call To Action
Having worked with a number of non-profits over the years, I’m fairly confident that one of the organization’s goals for the site is to collect donations. As such, that path/call to action should be clearer and more heavily emphasized. The Donate function should be separated out on its own and not combined as currently done with “Donation & Pins.”
That labeling is unclear/confusing – and further detracts from the site’s credibility.

Aaron Gustafson, Principal Easy! Designs, LLC

The first thing they need to do is spend some time on Information Architecture. The site is highly disorganized for a non-profit looking to disseminate crucial information. The homepage (and the site as a
whole) need to tell the user what they need to know and why it’s important. Right now it’s about as comprehensible as a MySpace page. If possible, it’d also be great to try to pull in as much content as possible to the site itself (maps, etc) to reduce the need to go out to other resources. Or, if they do need to link outside the site, those links should explicitly indicate that they go elsewhere.

Next up is a no-brainer: the design needs to support the brand, content, and IA plan. The visual clutter needs to be reduced and the whole thing needs to become more friendly and accessible (in the most general sense). Code-wise, the whole thing needs a massive re-write, but you would expect me to say that. The popups/new windows need to go. It also could do with a stiff dose of semantics.

With all of that, the site would be 200x better.