At the beginning of 2021 there are around 2.6 billion websites globally. Everyday, around a million websites are crafted and adding to this vast online catalogue. How can you make sure that a website promoting your products or services will stand out from your competition? Here at IT Infonity, we have the secret – it’s a design guaranteed to amaze your customers and get them talking about your brand. We also discovered a recipe for an award-winning website creation process that is quick and highly cost-effective. Below we describe pro-tips from our tech brainiacs.
Pro-tips
We’ve gathered some pro tips that might be useful for product owners and other stakeholders when working with your in-house or external software development teams.
1. Keep the focus on the business objectives
It’s very easy to get lost somewhere, and this is why business goals for your website, or any other digital product, are so important. They are the inspiration at the conception phase, a beacon for the team when making difficult choices, and the real measurement of success.
2. Work only with the best talents
Even with step-by-step instructions on how to create a great website, you won’t get outstanding results with an ordinary team. It’s painful, but this is the reality.
When we started selecting our talents for the task, we were looking for a very skill sets:
- Two frontend developers who are up for the challenge of working in a new framework within a very limited timeframe.
- Creative designer that can create a unique vision, and an experienced product designer to keep the structure and UX at an outstanding level.
- A scrum master who will help to maintain the processes and guide the team to the goal within the timeframe.
- We also used QA engineer support.
We are happy to have the top-notch experts in the market. If you can’t access them in your company, regardless of the reason (limited talent pool in your city, lack of HR and hiring processes, tight budget or timeline, etc.), seek for them outside of your organization.
3. Don’t separate developers from designers
Communication and collaboration is absolutely crucial for development of every digital product. Especially when you need to build digital product within a very limited timeframe. They need to have space to chat and discuss freely and share their ideas and challenges for development of successful digital product.
4. Fine-tune your processes
Processes are important – they save time, help to organize work and set the priorities. If you don’t have a plan on how to organize work, face challenges and support decision-making within the team, things can go really wrong such as exceeded deadlines.
To make it simple and efficient we start every product with kick-off workshops where stakeholders explain goals to the entire team including designers, software developers, QA engineer, and the meeting is led by a scrum master.
We use workshops to:
- Explain business goals to the team.
- Discuss the general shape of the website, its functionalities.
- Design the first wireframe if possible.
- Create the backlog, share the workload and let the team members assign with their tasks.
What makes our process quite special is that at IT Infonity everyone can feedback on everyone’s work. A developer comments on the work of a designer, and designers can feedback on software developer’s work, and the other way around. This way we are make sure that every single piece of the website is aligned to its goals.
5. Put proper communication channel between project team members
During the whole process, our designers and developers are using client provided tool like slack, Jira etc or Skype groups to chat and make quick calls, or Google Meet for a daily scrum meeting with the team and stakeholders.
6. Testing is important
Especially if you work on something that will be immediately released into the hands of ultimate users. It helps to eliminate most of the potential problems – this is important also for commercial products.
For us, one of the final steps before launching the website is internal testing. We create a group of 5 of IT Infonity’s designers and scrum masters and business analysts. Their main tasks is to:
- scroll down the whole page.
- execute some simple tasks for website.
- answer some questions regarding their feelings toward the website.
7. Rely on transparency
It’s crucial when collaborating with remote teams. Let the team use the selected communication channels to ask questions and solve their problems, instead of private messages. This way everyone will be aware of updated project progress and the current status.
8. Use scrum and be agile
Scrum helps to organize work on a daily basis and allows us to deliver results in iterations within the agreed timeline. An agile mindset helps, working smoothly and adjusting goals to the changing situation. Both aspects are equally important for software development in general, not only for website development.
9. Let the specialist decide
This is a very important for all of the stakeholders or product owners to select the best software development agency and make sure that the team understands the business goals and they know why they’re doing it. And then let them do it. They’re experts and they know how to do a work in more profitable way.
10. Choose technology wisely
We always suggest to select the technology as per the nature and complexity of the website such as for eCommerce website best technology and tools are WordPress, Shopify, Magento etc.
If you want to build website or landing page in short timeframe and cost-effective manner without compromising the quality work, I am sure you would love to work with us. Get in Touch
