What Clients Should Prepare for a Website Project

A successful web project requires intensive preparation. Whether you’re launching a simple brochure site, an enquiry engine or a complex e-commerce platform, the groundwork you do before kick-off directly impacts your budget, launch date and long-term ROI.

To help you avoid costly mid-build scope creep, unexpected delays and launch-day headaches, we’ve put together a handy prep checklist for everything you need to map out before your website project begins.

Core Essentials for Every Web Project

Whether you’re an ecommerce site, a service-based site, a massive online store or a small brochure site, there are certain factors you’ll need to consider for any web project.

1. Define your goals and metrics

Having said that most website projects will need to factor in the same considerations if they’re going to be successful, different types of websites have very different goals. But whatever they are, you need to make sure you’ve got them defined before you start.

Actions:

• Identify your core objectives – leads, sales, brand awareness, enquiries, etc.
• Set your targets (e.g. conversion rate improvements, traffic growth)

2. Know your audience

Or, to put it another way, what your user needs vs. what your business wants to say.

There’s often a disconnect between the two!

To avoid this, it helps to map out user personas – who are your target customers and what do they want? What problems are they trying to solve and how can your products or services help them with this? How might they use your website to find what they’re looking for?

Actions:

• Create 2-3 core personas for your customers. Who are they, and what are they trying to achieve? What’s stopping them from doing this?
• Map user journeys to key pages
• Ensure messaging is benefit-focused

3. Know your stakeholders and decision makers

Internal processes and bottlenecks can cause major delays when it comes to web projects. If every change has to go past ten different pairs of eyes and three different stages of approval, it will push your deadlines back. Establish an internal project team tasked with making the key decisions and define approval chains early.

Actions:

• Appoint a project lead – name a single point of contact to manage agency communication and consolidate all internal feedback
• Define final sign-off authority- identify who has ultimate approval power before kick-off
• Agree on internal turnaround times to prevent review delays from stalling the build

4. Pull together all your brand guidelines and visual assets

If your web design team are waiting for important brand elements to include within the design, it can delay the process substantially. Having your visual identity and brand assets organised before kick-off prevents design bottlenecks, avoids expensive last-minute revisions and ensures your new site reflects your brand perfectly from day one.

Actions:

• Collate high-res logos (SVG/EPS), official colour codes (HEX/RGB), and web-licensed brand fonts in one central folder
• Gather high-quality product photos, videos and team imagery, and identify any gaps
• Share your brand voice guidelines

5. Collect competitor insights and design inspiration

We all have elements of websites that we love… and hate, and when you’re planning a new site, taking inspiration from your competitors and other, similar, sites can be a brilliant source of inspiration. These visual references can help to bridge the gap between vague ideas and concrete design expectations. Sharing these with your agency will help them understand your taste early on. It will also highlight competitor strengths to match, as well as any industry gaps you can exploit.

Actions:

• Compile a “Likes and Dislikes” list of 3-5 competitor sites, noting which elements you prefer or want to avoid (layouts, navigation, calls to action, etc), as well as reasons why
• Identify gaps – what’s missing from competitor websites that you can add?

6. Map out functionality and tech stack

Identify the functionality you need from your website, and the technology that you need in place to make that happen. This helps to avoid scope creep and increased costs from additional integrations. What’s powering your contact forms? Do you take online payments? Does your website include interactive tools such as calculators, maps or product comparisons? Do you require gated content, a customer portal or a booking system?

All of these will require their own integrations into your site, or will need to be custom-built.

Actions:

• Make a list of all your current and desired functionality, as well as any tech such as CRM, email marketing providers or payment platforms

7. Outline content types

The next step is to define what you need from your pages. Go through your existing website and make a note of all the different types of pages on there. There will likely be more than you think! For example:

• Homepage
• Category pages
• Product/service pages
• Blog
• Blog articles
• Contact page
• About page
• Case studies
• Thank you page
• Checkout pages
• … and so on

Add to this list any new pages that you want on your new site, for example, an email signup page, or specific landing pages for PPC or email.

Content planning for your new website is vital. Even now, when websites are increasingly built using blocks rather than page templates, you still need to know what you want your pages to do, so that you can ensure your blocks allow it.

Actions:

• Compile a list of all your existing and required page types
• Ensure this aligns with your user journeys
• Map redirects between old pages and new to maintain SEO authority and a seamless customer experience

8. Confirm internal resource

A web build requires active client participation. When we’re designing and developing clients’ websites, we maintain constant communication throughout, whether this is via project management tools such as Monday or through regular catch-ups. But client input is crucial, and if your developer is waiting for feedback for days at a time, it can delay your project. Make sure your expectations are realistic when it comes to offering feedback, drafting copy or gathering assets, and who is needed for this. And don’t forget to take into account holidays, busy periods or other projects as well!

Building a Digital Presence from the Ground Up

See how we created a flexible, fully-branded and mobile-optimised website for waste-management company Opteco.

Branding | Web Development | Web Design Read the Case Study

eCommerce-specific Preparation

In the next section, we’ll look in a bit more depth at the factors that you need to consider if you’re planning an ecommerce project. eCommerce sites can often be more complex than service or solution-based sites, in terms of data, logistics and functionality, which means there is additional ….

9. Complete and organise product data

Bad product data is the #1 cause of e-commerce launch delays – which is why it’s vital to make sure all your product data is captured up front, and that it’s correct and complete. If your products have multiple variations (colours, sizes, quantities, etc), you need to account for these, as well as bundled items (if you offer this).

You’ll also need to consider future products and ensure that your website architecture can accommodate them. On the flip side of this, if there are products that you no longer offer, ensure this is captured in your requirements as well. The last thing you want is a visitor landing on your shiny new website… and wanting to buy a product that you actually discontinued last year!

Actions:

• Produce a master product sheet – capture names, descriptions, SKUs, URLs, pricing, categories, attributes and specifications
• Make sure you capture all product variations – sizes, colours, bundles, materials, etc
• Plan for upcoming product launches so your site can accommodate them

10. Establish product structure and taxonomy

A logical site architecture is vital to a smooth user experience. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find, browse and buy the products that they need. This is why it’s important to have a structured hierarchy to your site. Make sure your products are mapped to the most logical categories and sub-categories.

Making changes to your website’s structure and architecture later on in the process can result in delays, but getting this all mapped out beforehand will avoid this. It’s important to strike a balance between satisfying user intent (your category pages are a massive optimisation opportunity for SEO, so do your keyword research) and going too granular (if you’re repeatedly getting down to categories with only one or two products in, you might be going too deep!).

As a general rule of thumb, you want your products to be no more than three clicks away from the homepage.

├── Furniture
│   ├── Seating
│   │   ├── Outdoor Seating
│   │   │   ├── Chairs
│   │   │   │   ├── Metal Chairs
│   │   │   │   │  ├── Black Aluminium Foldable Chairs

├── Garden Furniture
│   ├── Garden Dining Sets (2-Seater, 4-Seater, 6-Seater+)
│   ├── Sofa & Lounge Sets
│   ├── Benches & Sun Loungers
│   ├── Parasols & Gazebos
│   └── Protective Furniture Covers

Actions:

• Design a logical hierarchy of categories and sub-categories based on your products and user intent
• Try to keep all pages within three clicks of the homepage
• Use categories for product types (e.g. lawnmowers) and filters for attributes (cordless, under £300, green, etc)

11. Plan out promotions and discounts

If you offer (or plan to offer) promotions and discount codes, this kind of logic can require additional custom development if not factored in early, which naturally comes with a cost. So, it’s important to map out all the different types of promotion you offer and how these will be applied (automatic, discount code, percentage vs a fixed amount, etc).

Actions:

• Map out all your offers and discounts (existing and upcoming)

12. Define customer journeys and accounts

The key with eCommerce sites is minimising friction points in the purchase journey. You want your customers to go from product to purchase as seamlessly as possible, without losing their way, getting stuck or going round in circles. One way of doing this is to allow guest checkout as well as creating an account. Avoid having too many stages to your checkout funnel and make calls to action clear and self-explanatory.

If you do offer customers the ability to log into an account, you also need to consider what they need to see when they log in, as well as the login process itself. Order tracking, wishlists, reordering… you should be aiming to make it easy and hassle-free.

Actions:

• Map out your current journeys – there’s always more than one. Look at Analytics data to see how visitors behave once they get to your site. Where are they coming in? Where are they getting stuck or dropping out? How many stages does the process have?
• Map out your desired journeys
• List out what your “My account” should have

13. Finalise logistics, payment systems, integrations etc.

Even the snazziest and slickest website is useless if it doesn’t talk to the rest of your business. Seamless web operations rely on your store communicating directly with your backend systems from day one. Failing to scope these connections early is a classic cause of launch delays, admin headaches and broken user journeys.

Actions:

• Map out payment gateways – PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, etc
• Confirm your shipping matrix – delivery times, weight rules, etc
• Determine your stock update frequencies – will stock be live and updated in real time, or will you use batch updates?

Preparing for a website build requires upfront effort, but treating preparation as a core phase of your project pays off in the long run. By defining your goals, organising your assets, locking down product data and mapping technical integrations early, you’ll enable your agency to deliver a website that does exactly what you need it to, on time and on budget.