One of the things that saddens me the most about our industry is that in the age of “green” where most industries are striving to reduce the level of waste they produce (or least pretending to) the average lifetime of a website is about 2 years. Not that every website gets redone every 2 years, because clients often don’t have the budget, but in that many sites show outdated design, content and technology much faster than PCs need to get changed.
Being a project manager, I have seen my fair share of difficult projects, and the biggest mistake that I see clients make is that they have a complete lack of interest or understanding of the technology being used to build their website! But what they don’t realize is that technological choices are the biggest reason sites become outdated so fast.
In order to avoid getting caught, try asking these 10 questions to your Web agency before giving them a project:
1. Which technologies (programming language, framework, database, web server) will be used on the server-side and why?
This is a key question. The choice of technology will have an impact on hosting: if you were previously hosted on a PHP server and your new site is in Rails, you will have to switch servers. Also, open source technologies such as PHP and Rails are used more widely than proprietary ones such as .NET. If all of these things sound like encrypted hieroglyphics, know this: make sure you have someone on your team or a consultant that understands technology, and ask your agency WHY they are choosing certain technologies. This will give you a good idea of whether they understand your needs or if they are simply trying to recycle another website they developed three months ago.
2. On what browsers will my website work?
It is important that this be addressed before the project starts. If fact, this question can be turned into: will my website work in Internet Explorer 6? Despite being one of the worst piece of software ever written, IE6 is still used by close to 10% of Internet users according to the latest figures. The answer to this question depends on your target audience. If you are targeting 40+ government employees, it might be a good idea to have an IE6 compatible site. In almost every other case, you should avoid IE6 like the plague: it reduces graphic possibilities and increases the production time of any website by at least 25%. If you choose not to support IE6 though, make sure your boss is not running it from his home computer…
3. What will be done to make sure my site is indexed by Search Engines?
Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O) has become of the key factors of success of website. You need to make sure that your site’s developers use unique page titles and meta descriptions for every page of your site. Your homepage should have as much indexable content as possible. Each image should have an <alt> tag that can be read by Google. Make sure you have Google Webmaster Tools installed and that you submit an XML Site Map to search engines. In fact, the SEO best practices deserve their own blog post, which I will make sure to write in the next few weeks. Suffice it to say, an agency does not deserve its title if it is not very knowledgable about how to improve your site’s position in search results.
4. How will I be able to update my content?
In this day and age, no one wants to have to rely on his agency in order to update a sentence in his website. Make sure you have a Content Management System (CMS) that lets you edit your site’s text content, as well as its images and other multimedia files. But remember one thing though, a CMS does not mean you can add new sections, change your logo or change the site’s layout – unless your agency plans on building you a very advanced system. A CMS will often increase your budget by at least 50%, but this investment will ensure a longer lifetime for your site, and you will no longer need to beg your agency in order to make a change that your boss requested “for yesterday”. And if you want to save some money, ask your agency if they can use an open-source CMS such as drupal, spip or even wordpress.
5. How will I be able to track the performance of my site?
This one is easy to adress. Just make sure that your agency knows you will be using google analytics s0 that they can include the tracking code on every page of your future web site. Oh and make sure they install the code a few days before you launch your site, as there is nothing more frustrated than knowing hundreds of people are viewing thousands of pages on your site but that information is being lost down the drain because a developer forgot a coma… (yes this has happened to me before)
6. What will my urls look like?
Most clients and even agencies will never even discuss this point, but your url structure is very important, first to your users, who can use it to understand your site’s navigational structure, but also because urls with important keywords will help improve your position in search results. Make sure your urls will look like “www.site.com/category/article-tile” and not “www.site.com/somthing/pages/category/somthing.jsp?catid=8&pageid=87…
7. Who is responsible if I find a bug after my site is launched?
A very important point. What if you launch a website, and two months later you realize that there is a bug that was there all along but that you did not see because it is the first time you’re going on your site using Internet Explorer 8… will your agency assume responsibility for this? Well this all depends on your contract. What, you didn’t sign a contract with your agency? Now you’re asking for trouble… In general client/agency contracts should include at least a 90 day unconditional warranty on bugs and defects. Beyond that, you’ll have to negotiate. But remember this: bugs aren’t equal to changes. No matter what, if you want to change your logo or add a section, you will have to pay extra.
8. What will my website look like on a mobile phone?
Too many mid-level managers who are just starting to understand why they should spend some time worrying about the Web forget that the Web is no longer the exclusive domain of browsers. An increasing number of users are accessing the Web through their mobile phones, whether IPhones, Blackberrys or Androids. And this is a trend which will only accelarate in the coming months. Make sure you plan some budget for a mobile version of your site, with a nice url like “mobile.yoursite.com”
9. Do I own the code?
This is another vital contractual issue that you need to address before signing anything. General wisdom says that as long as you pay your agency everything that you owe them, you are the sole owner of your code and are free to retrieve it, back it up, and send it to another agency to be re-used. The one thing you cannot do, however, is take the code and sell it to another company. You basically own the right to the code, but not to exploit it commercially.
10. How will the code be commented?
This is every developer’s nightmare: having to work on code that was written by someone else, and which is so poorly commented that it’s impossible to understand. Ask your agency to show a sample of how they comment their code and show it to another developer. Oh, and make sure that part of your agency’s deliverables is a technical guide to how your site was built, whether database structure, CSS framework, logic behind dynamic contect etc… Hopefully, you will never have to use this guide, but they day you want another team to work on your site, this document will prove to be a life-saver.
My last point is: if after reading my post you feel like you’re so far from understading a tenth of what I talked about you would rather trust your agency because they are nice people, hire a consultant. This is the best way to make sure you won’t have to redo your site entirely every other year.
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10 tech questions to ask a Web agency before starting a project
One of the things that saddens me the most about our industry is that in the age of “green” where most industries are striving to reduce the level of waste they produce (or least pretending to) the average lifetime of a website is about 2 years. Not that every website gets redone every 2 years, because clients often don’t have the budget, but in that many sites show outdated design, content and technology much faster than PCs need to get changed.
Being a project manager, I have seen my fair share of difficult projects, and the biggest mistake that I see clients make is that they have a complete lack of interest or understanding of the technology being used to build their website! But what they don’t realize is that technological choices are the biggest reason sites become outdated so fast.
In order to avoid getting caught, try asking these 10 questions to your Web agency before giving them a project:
1. Which technologies (programming language, framework, database, web server) will be used on the server-side and why?
This is a key question. The choice of technology will have an impact on hosting: if you were previously hosted on a PHP server and your new site is in Rails, you will have to switch servers. Also, open source technologies such as PHP and Rails are used more widely than proprietary ones such as .NET. If all of these things sound like encrypted hieroglyphics, know this: make sure you have someone on your team or a consultant that understands technology, and ask your agency WHY they are choosing certain technologies. This will give you a good idea of whether they understand your needs or if they are simply trying to recycle another website they developed three months ago.
2. On what browsers will my website work?
It is important that this be addressed before the project starts. If fact, this question can be turned into: will my website work in Internet Explorer 6? Despite being one of the worst piece of software ever written, IE6 is still used by close to 10% of Internet users according to the latest figures. The answer to this question depends on your target audience. If you are targeting 40+ government employees, it might be a good idea to have an IE6 compatible site. In almost every other case, you should avoid IE6 like the plague: it reduces graphic possibilities and increases the production time of any website by at least 25%. If you choose not to support IE6 though, make sure your boss is not running it from his home computer…
3. What will be done to make sure my site is indexed by Search Engines?
Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O) has become of the key factors of success of website. You need to make sure that your site’s developers use unique page titles and meta descriptions for every page of your site. Your homepage should have as much indexable content as possible. Each image should have an <alt> tag that can be read by Google. Make sure you have Google Webmaster Tools installed and that you submit an XML Site Map to search engines. In fact, the SEO best practices deserve their own blog post, which I will make sure to write in the next few weeks. Suffice it to say, an agency does not deserve its title if it is not very knowledgable about how to improve your site’s position in search results.
4. How will I be able to update my content?
In this day and age, no one wants to have to rely on his agency in order to update a sentence in his website. Make sure you have a Content Management System (CMS) that lets you edit your site’s text content, as well as its images and other multimedia files. But remember one thing though, a CMS does not mean you can add new sections, change your logo or change the site’s layout – unless your agency plans on building you a very advanced system. A CMS will often increase your budget by at least 50%, but this investment will ensure a longer lifetime for your site, and you will no longer need to beg your agency in order to make a change that your boss requested “for yesterday”. And if you want to save some money, ask your agency if they can use an open-source CMS such as drupal, spip or even wordpress.
5. How will I be able to track the performance of my site?
This one is easy to adress. Just make sure that your agency knows you will be using google analytics s0 that they can include the tracking code on every page of your future web site. Oh and make sure they install the code a few days before you launch your site, as there is nothing more frustrated than knowing hundreds of people are viewing thousands of pages on your site but that information is being lost down the drain because a developer forgot a coma… (yes this has happened to me before)
6. What will my urls look like?
Most clients and even agencies will never even discuss this point, but your url structure is very important, first to your users, who can use it to understand your site’s navigational structure, but also because urls with important keywords will help improve your position in search results. Make sure your urls will look like “www.site.com/category/article-tile” and not “www.site.com/somthing/pages/category/somthing.jsp?catid=8&pageid=87…
7. Who is responsible if I find a bug after my site is launched?
A very important point. What if you launch a website, and two months later you realize that there is a bug that was there all along but that you did not see because it is the first time you’re going on your site using Internet Explorer 8… will your agency assume responsibility for this? Well this all depends on your contract. What, you didn’t sign a contract with your agency? Now you’re asking for trouble… In general client/agency contracts should include at least a 90 day unconditional warranty on bugs and defects. Beyond that, you’ll have to negotiate. But remember this: bugs aren’t equal to changes. No matter what, if you want to change your logo or add a section, you will have to pay extra.
8. What will my website look like on a mobile phone?
Too many mid-level managers who are just starting to understand why they should spend some time worrying about the Web forget that the Web is no longer the exclusive domain of browsers. An increasing number of users are accessing the Web through their mobile phones, whether IPhones, Blackberrys or Androids. And this is a trend which will only accelarate in the coming months. Make sure you plan some budget for a mobile version of your site, with a nice url like “mobile.yoursite.com”
9. Do I own the code?
This is another vital contractual issue that you need to address before signing anything. General wisdom says that as long as you pay your agency everything that you owe them, you are the sole owner of your code and are free to retrieve it, back it up, and send it to another agency to be re-used. The one thing you cannot do, however, is take the code and sell it to another company. You basically own the right to the code, but not to exploit it commercially.
10. How will the code be commented?
This is every developer’s nightmare: having to work on code that was written by someone else, and which is so poorly commented that it’s impossible to understand. Ask your agency to show a sample of how they comment their code and show it to another developer. Oh, and make sure that part of your agency’s deliverables is a technical guide to how your site was built, whether database structure, CSS framework, logic behind dynamic contect etc… Hopefully, you will never have to use this guide, but they day you want another team to work on your site, this document will prove to be a life-saver.
My last point is: if after reading my post you feel like you’re so far from understading a tenth of what I talked about you would rather trust your agency because they are nice people, hire a consultant. This is the best way to make sure you won’t have to redo your site entirely every other year.