Website Project Disaster – Watch for the Warning Signs
If nothing else, hopefully the value of the Briefcase Project is for other business owners and professionals can learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. The story I am about to tell will hopefully help web professionals and business owners who are currently going through a website development project, to avoid this unhappy outcome. Here is where this website project went wrong:
- Live before its Finished - This was the first major mistake we made. The client went to a trade show early in the website development process and started handing out market materials with their new website address before they had even written the content for the site. No surprise, they started getting calls from folks that the website was down and they couldn’t go online to respond as they were told. We got a call late on a Saturday telling us to take the site live right away because of this problem. So we did some quick work to put the site together enough so people wouldn’t see half-finished pages. The reason this turned out to be a bad decision was the site went live before the project was finished which 1. made the final deliverable unclear and 2. the client had no incentive to ever finish the site because they already had something working. Eight months later we were still waiting for them to send us content.
- Employee Turnover – During the course of this project, our website contact was switched four different times; starting with the IT manager and finally ending with a summer marketing intern. The problem is: each person had a different vision of the website and as soon as we started working with a new person, we got a new site map. The reason for the switch was employee turnover within the company and with each switch, the business owner further disengaged from the project.
- Avoiding communication – One of the major things that bothered about this project was I could never get the person who hired us on the phone or any response to emails. When I did try to call the office one of the four “helpers” would answer the phone and would not put the owner on the phone. You can see the kind of message this sends as to how important the website was to this business if the owner wouldn’t take five minutes to talk to their webmaster.
- Figured out what the wanted AFTER site was built - The business owner finally got around to reviewing the website as dictated by their “helpers”, once it was 95% done. No surprise, it was not the site they wanted. At this point our contract had been fulfilled and the only choices were to finish the site they didn’t like or start over, which of course was going to cost more money.
The result of this project was a site that nobody liked and for the first time in my 10+ years building websites, I walked away from a project without finishing it. The key thing to learn here is that what we were experiencing had nothing to do with technical problems or technical capabilities, this was a leadership problem. From my perspective, we were the experts who had been through this process many, many times and should have taken more control of the process, instead of letting them dictate the timeline. On the client side, I believe it was a case of a business owner delegating something that they should not have to employees that didn’t have the decision-making power to see the project through.
If you are a business owner reading this, in the middle of a website project, you need to stop thinking of the website as a marketing project and start viewing the site as a member of your organization and treat it with the care of managing an employee.
If you are a web professional reading this, let me tell you it is OK to walk away from an impossible client. Our revenue stream was better for it. My employees were better for it and my stress level was better for it.
Do you have project warning signs? Or ideas where this project could have been turned around? Please share your advice and save others from this fate.
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