Devil Is In the Details: Three Web Design Planning Mistakes
3 Web Design Planning Mistakes
I’ve been a part of some fairly large projects in the past that – how can I say – missed the execution mark. Slipped milestones, cost overages, scope creep. You name it. I’ve witnessed it. It’s web design; wild results come with the territory.
The misses occurred, not because of lack of execution, but because of undocumented execution.
To be sure, everyone understood the basics: when major milestones needed to be hit, when design reviews were to take place, how many resources needed to be assigned.
The devil is in the details
What we found was more subtle. We simply never wrote the details down. We expected things of each other.
Here are my favorite three subtle project management details that can lead to pain if not caught early. From what I could tell, had we simply written some of these expectations down – and of course, had the project manager enforced them – who knows how much time, cost, scope and Aspirin could’ve been saved.
Define the Audience in the Briefing Stage, Not the Design Planning Stage
I’ve worked on several projects where the design director asks questions of the end user demographics after a design brief has been created.
That’s backwards. Understand the audience to understand the design parameters (among other things). A good example: what paragraph font base would you choose if your end users were 65+ as opposed to 18-30? Granted, that’s an extreme example, but proper end-user analysis informs the design planning phase, not the other way around.
Define File Formats in the Statement of Work (If Possible)
JPEG, GIF, or PNG images? MOV, FLV, or MPEG videos? Yes, it’s a big deal to not have them defined. No, you shouldn’t wait until you’re loading them into the system for the first time before deciding what format to use.
I expected that the videographer was going to deliver Flash video in FLV format for me to plug into the site. I had a perfect Flash player to utilize: easy to incorporate, configurable design, and it loaded quickly on run-time. Instead, I received 100 MPEG files, the one format that this player didn’t support. I had a choice: find a new player, or ask the video guy to re-format all 100 files. Had we simply decided up front, it could have saved me 10 hours finding a new player that was just as configurable as the original.
Content Writing Is a Separate Milestone
Many clients I work with believe that all writing is ‘webbable.’ In other words, documentation recovered from company PR documents or print marketing material can simply be converted to HTML word-for-word. Not only is this ill-advised, it’s the worst way to look at content writing for the web.
Web writing is unique: it must be scan-able, concise, and easily readable. To accomplish that, treat web writing as a separate milestone in your project plan. Planning to ‘import’ editorial into the development phase of any web project is doing your client a disservice. Don’t expect writing (whether it be web writing or writing ‘importation’) to occur as the last pixel is being put in place.
I’d hate for your marketing site to sound like this! 
If my site sounded like that, I’d be out of a job!