“We’re launching a new website!” Those words spark excitement and anticipation as soon as they are broadcast out to an organization. They also trigger an immediate, supercharged analysis and indexing of processes, systems, and reports inside the mind of any digital or business consultant involved.
It can be a frightening, at times overwhelming, endeavor for any client. That’s when they will look to an expert consulting team to ensure they come out with an efficient and complete solution that positions them better than where they started.
Unfortunately, many times the client doesn’t really know what could be hiding in their current solution. On the surface it all appears to work and meets their business needs. In reality, it starts to take on the characteristics of a bottomless bowl of tangled spaghetti when you start looking closer.
When an organization makes the decision, not to mention the significant investment, to re-platform their website, missed opportunities during the initial scoping and discovery can lead to some common pitfalls down the line. These traps can surface well into the project as you start to “turn over the rocks” in their existing solutions and processes. As these arise, they can impact timelines, budgets, and even the project architecture.
The consulting team can mitigate these potential project timebombs by knowing the right questions to ask during those initial scoping and discovery phases, starting with these top five.
Emphasize the importance of a thorough walkthrough
For many projects, the business consultants and developers may not have access to any environments for the client’s current platform. It’s great when they do since it helps to match like-for-like functionality and provides visibility on how content is structured. In the absence of being able to poke around on your own, the business consultant needs to have a day-in-the-life experience.
This is where it is critical to have the right people in the room. If the content team has not been included in the discussions yet, pull them in. They will be the day-to-day users of what you are going to create for them and will know all the current workarounds and pain points better than anyone.
This team should provide you with any workflows and approval processes in place. Have them demonstrate building a new page and a new component. They can tell you which pages most frequently change, and which ones are more static. They can also provide insight on which pages might be higher profile, and subject to more scrutiny, by the organization stakeholders or executive team.
By insisting on this type of walkthrough, the consultant can also better understand more about the client’s digital maturity. If they are completely new to a CMS platform like Optimizely, they may need a little extra guidance to understand the pages and blocks structure used to build content. Conversely, they may already be using a platform that leverages a page template and component structure, yet they build and manage all content using straight HTML. This scenario happens more than you might think.
Ask about Dynamic Content
I ask this one religiously, and I’m always asked back, “what do you mean by dynamic content?” Dynamic content can be defined this way:
Content that is automatically rendered on the front-end based on properties within an existing CMS component (page or block) without needing to be manually curated by a content author.
Examples of this can include:
- A team member’s profile image and business title from a Biography page is dynamically added to all “Meet the Team” listing pages that that team member belongs to
- Rendering pre-filtered Article listing pages based on a sub-set of categories or keywords assigned to articles
- Showing, hiding, or changing displayed content based on specific conditions, such a user’s stored selection to a prompt
- External content from third-party sources – this could be team information from Azure AD or regulatory financial data such as a stock’s historical performance graph
It is important to understand that dynamic content is different than personalized content. Showing different headers, footers, or pages for a specific group or country target can be handled through the CMS, such as with Optimizely’s Visitor Groups and Markets.
Dynamic content should be looked at as more of a time-saver for the content creation team. It is leveraging a property you already have on a block or a page to serve up that content somewhere else without having to re-create it in a new block or page type.
As this is an efficiency for the content team, it may not be called out as an obvious must-have requirement during discovery. It’s magic that happens in the background that can be taken for granted or applied to content that rarely changes. It’s an out-of-sight/out-of-mind scenario. Unless you get them thinking about where this content might be, they will likely not mention it until after you have built a different solution that does not render the content dynamically for them.
Frequently forgotten pages
These pages tend to fall under the set-it-and-forget-it strategy and can stay forgotten until nearing the end of the project when someone speaks them into existence. They are easily missed because they can only be accessed through a very specific series of buried links, or by having the URL to the page itself - but they almost always are classified as critical must-haves.
Usually these are some sort of terms and conditions page or a one-off form that can be handled with standard pages, text, and forms.
In other cases, the page could be a completely different page layout, design, and functionality from a legacy entity that they are required to keep. That “simple” form could end up being a progressive form that needs pre-filled fields based on customer data from a previously submitted form.
Just as with the dynamic content, you need to plant the seed with the client early to get overlooked pages like these on their radar. This will also help to guide a conversation around content auditing. While a consulting team may find hidden gems under those rocks, the client may be unaware of the content they have and, more importantly, what is worth keeping and what content should be left behind.
National and International eCommerce
Knowing where your client’s customers are located throughout the world seems like basic pre-project knowledge. However, key factors like their industry, whether they are B2B only, B2C only, a mix of B2B and B2C, and if they are for-profit or non-profit can all make a big difference.
Dig into the details early when it comes to regulatory requirements that apply to their specific eCommerce business model. They likely have a compliance team, either as part of their financial arm or within their products team, that will be key during these conversations.
Some of the questions you want to ask could include:
- Do products need to have labeling for certain US states? (Prop 65 Warnings in CA are a perfect example of this)
- What information is required in a product description?
- Are there certain products or brands that need to be embargoed or restricted from a country or location?
- Are there purchasing or donation limits that need to be managed?
- What systems are being used to manage regulatory rules around tax management, invoicing, or fulfillment?
The curse of the “Lift and Shift”
The term “Lift and Shift” is an overly simplified way to say that we are just moving a site from platform A to platform B in an as-is state. The problem with this phrase is that it assumes A and B are identical twins that will match up perfectly from head to toe, or header to footer.
Lift and Shift is more like a cloning experiment. It’s going to look pretty darn close and will provide like-for-like functionality for the end user, but it might have a slightly different personality.
The idea of pixel perfect can cause a project to jump off the tracks fast. This is a conversation to have early with the client to set clear guidelines, and even possibly define acceptable variances, for padding, font weights, etc.
While a front-end developer will do all they can to carry over page layout specs as precisely as possible, there may be some slight differences simply because of the way the new platform fits all the components together on a page. The same holds true when doing a complete site redesign. What is presented in a wireframe may not be an exact translation into a platform.
If you did the day-in-the-life walkthrough, you likely saw certain tasks that were being done by applying a workaround, or that highlighted a particular pain point within the current solution. Part of re-platforming is to improve. Improve processes, improve efficiencies, improve workflows.
The promise is to provide like-for-like but encourage the client to not bring broken stuff over too. While you may run into natural resistance to change, it provides an opportunity to get a client excited about the capabilities and flexibility that will come with their new solution.
As I stated at the start, launching a new site is an exciting time for an organization, and it is the consultant’s job to be their tour guide throughout the adventure. A consulting team shines when they reduce the client’s stress by asking the right questions in the beginning to avoid these common pitfalls and surprises later in the project.
Remember to walk along with the client to understand their day-to-day, starting with a wholistic view of the content from the teams that live in the solution full time. That, along with a complete content audit at the beginning, is worth its weight in gold to better define scope and may help uncover long forgotten content structures, pages, and forms that could trip you up down the line.
Avoid common development stalls and re-work culprits by addressing them early in the project. An up-front detailed view of national or international regulations that apply to your client’s industry and business model can help avoid legal landmines. Set clear expectations for the end result and don’t get stuck in pixel perfect purgatory. Make improvements where they make sense and, and maybe, just maybe, we can retire the term “lift and shift.”
At Thinkmax, we specialize in partnering with retail companies to enhance their growth through their digital platforms by leveraging our deep industry expertise. If you have any questions about re-platforming or launching a website for your organization and need a skilled consulting team to help navigate the process, please contact us.
This article was written by Jeanne Marie Shuffler, Senior Digital Business Analyst at Thinkmax. Jeanne Marie leverages her more than ten years of experience working in, and doing implementations on, the Optimizely CMS and Commerce applications. She brings extensive industry knowledge for B2B, retail distribution, financial institutions, and non-profit in her portfolio of work. When she isn’t conducting fine-tooth web analysis to benefit our clients, she enjoys sports, cooking, gardening, and doting over her rescue dogs.
