Summary:
Our FinTech clients often confess building a large-scale website to support their rapidly growing companies is a nightmare. There’s no alignment internally or with their design agency, everything takes longer and costs more than planned, and the website never turns out as expected.
This is such a common occurrence because most companies don’t manage the project in the correct order. Instead they dive right into sexy visual design or obsess over tech solutions before goal setting.
If you want an effective site, know that strategy should lead the design, your design should lead implementation, and optimisation can only happen on a solid foundation.
Let’s break it down by steps and the ordered tasks associated with each:
Step 1: Strategy Phase
Gain an understanding of why you’re doing this website project and what you’re trying to achieve.
Gather user needs (you should conduct user research at this point).
Understand and document business requirements.
Collate user needs and business requirements to set project d goals that balance both.
Involve all your stakeholders and ensure their buy-in on your final goals and strategy.
Step 2: Design Phase
Decide what content and features you’ll need to reach your goals.
Choose the technology, tools, and infrastructure required to deliver your content and features.
Figure out the structure of the content and features (where will everything go on your website?).
Determine the interaction design and content style, like your tone of voice, content and how the navigation will function.
Ideate and create the visual design elements and overall aesthetic influenced by content and functionality.
Step 3: Implementation Phase
Build and implement your website.
Get a ‘hello world’ live early and across the full infrastructure.
Iterate, seeking continuous stakeholder feedback instead of doing big reveals.
Go live (everything should be so stable at this point that going live isn’t a stressful event).
Step 4: Optimisation Phase
Ensure your foundation is solid across the board.
Start measuring against your goals.
Optimise SEO, UX, content, CRO, etc.
Change and improve your website as necessary.