Ultimate Guide to Web Project Management

8 min readJun 9, 2021

The online business trend has been increased over the past decades because people love online shopping to save their precious time. So, companies need digital existence and a proper web-based application to show their products/services there.

If you pursued your career as a web developer, this guide is compulsory for understanding the importance of web project management. However, if you don’t follow the guidelines, you will get different types of errors, including 404, bugs, unhappy clients, and many more.

This supreme guide will undoubtedly help you understand website project management to know how to plan and manage a site with planning, building, optimization, finalization, and launch.

What is website project management?

Web project management is the name of delivering website projects efficiently, from new site developments to redesigns as well as migrations.

It is a management technique wherein a task is broken down into multiple tasks, which are worked collaboratively within a project monitoring or management system and procedure to satisfy a specific goal.

Before you start working on the website project management procedure, you’ll need to establish yourself as much as implement it.

Following are three vital elements you will need to have in the area:

Project manager: This person leads the group through a task, utilizing a project monitoring tool. If your organization operates on enough range, you could hire a full-time task manager or engage a freelance task supervisor on a project-by-project basis. Alternatively, an existing staff member can be offered duty for leading a task.
Project Management Tool: In web task management, the project is typically handled within a job management system. These platforms all give methods to handle the task that provides the end-user product, but besides this typical objective, they can vary substantially. We suggest you review a platform’s features very carefully to evaluate its appropriateness for your team.
Project monitoring approach: An approach is a system of methods that arranges just how a process works. Of the many methods used in task administration, agile project management is perhaps the very best recognized. Other project monitoring approaches which are commonly utilized to supply site advancement projects consist of XP and PRINCE2. Whichever approach you make use of, your team will need to be trained entirely in it before you start working on actual projects. The methodology also needs to be described in the project documentation within your task management tools.

Phase # 1: Planning

The first concern in the preparation phase of website project administration is defining what the customer wants in the most straightforward and most precise terms possible.

You can begin by inviting the client to complete a set of questions about essential project variables. Here are a couple of examples of inquiries to consist of:

Which is the target market?
What areas would you certainly like your website to have?
What pages do you need?
How commonly will you change/update the web content on your site? Will you require a content management system (CMS)?
Can you share three website layouts that you like? What do you like concerning them?
What is your budget plan?

If you can answer the questions given above, it will be easy for you to create deliverable goals for the given project and define its scope. The even more concerns you ask at this phase, the much more you can decrease the risk of problematic clients grumbling concerning subjective variables further down the line. We recommend listing a minimum of 10–20 crucial inquiries that you can ask at the start of each project.

Using your set of questions, in addition to info gathered via conferences with the client, produce quotes as well as specifications for the website, covering the complete task scope as discussed with the client. As soon as customer has consented to the quote as well as entered into a contract with you after that, you can move on to the next part of planning.

Planning with the project team members

The following action in the planning phase is to explain and discuss website specifications with your team so that you can convert them right into a website project plan. However, you and your team need to address the following question:

What are the project deliverables?
How does the job break down right into tasks, and who can do each task?
How much of the customer’s budget plan will the project need?
Where are the dependencies in the job, where completion of one job is just feasible after a particular various other task has been finished?

With these critical questions responded to, you must have the ability to design an entire task plan detailing how the site project will be delivered. You currently need to take this plan to the client for their approval.

When the client, as well as other vital project stakeholders, have agreed to the strategy, you can develop a new project in your project administration platform and also start creating the task tasks.

Phase # 2: Building

In a website project’s construct or build stage, your team will likely focus on producing the site’s design, content, layout, and functionalities.

Meanwhile, the emphasis of task administration often tends to be divided between checking the team’s development, guaranteeing full adoption of the project administration procedure, and getting rid of any ‘blockers’ which staff members have flagged up.

Monitoring team progress can be done on a granulated, task-by-task, as well as likewise on a bigger-picture level, making use of visual aids such as burndown graphs, which represent the portion of project work finished, about the offered time.

Guaranteeing complete fostering of the task management procedure is work for the task manager. This might entail training team members in how to utilize the task administration platform.

A blocker can be anything that’s stopping a task from getting finished, from a gap in someone’s website design expertise to a missing item of content that is required to complete a web page layout. When a staff member flags up a blocker, the task supervisor works to find its solution.

Routine team conferences throughout the build stage can assist a team stays on top of all these considerations.

Phase # 3: Optimization

From maximizing cross-browser efficiency to compressing image documents, this is the phase where your group brings the website up to the highest possible standards it can.

We suggest you include optimization right into your task monitoring process by using a site optimization checklist as your basis.

As soon as you have your list, you can create a brand-new task for each requirement and designate it to a pertinent employee; from this point forward, project management of the optimization phase functions similarly as it does throughout the building.

Stage # 4: Finalization

This stage of website project management covers the work involved in the given processes:

Initial testing: From a task administration point of view, this begins with a testing checklist comparable to the one utilized to identify the jobs for the previous stage. For every testing activity, a task must be produced, from inspecting whether on-site transactions work to evaluating the site’s conformity to access standards. Additional complexity is added by the requirement for new jobs to be developed when an issue is recognized throughout testing. When an employee finds a concern throughout testing, they need to produce a job for the issue as well as assign it to the job manager. The project supervisor then examines the fears and reassigns the task to a staff member to deal with the concern.
Go live: Throughout this procedure, the site, as well as its support systems, end up being operational. Key jobs consist of publishing the website to its domain if the client has registered it already. Otherwise, you will ask the client to register a domain name relevant to his business, a web hosting plan as per the business needs, and integrate it with applications such as analytics devices and e-mail advertising clients.
Client/staff training: Individuals that will take care of the site after launch need to be shown precisely how to utilize it. This can be facilitated with training sessions, which can be intended into the PM platform as events.

Fundamental marketing/SEO strategies: These are the nuts and screws tasks that need to be done to guarantee the site is ready to attract visitors, from submitting the sitemap to Google to establish web links between the site and implementing the site 600+ advertising and marketing tips. Once more, a checklist-based technique for determining different tasks has been advised.

Your team will be working with numerous of these bullet points at once (or possibly even every one of them). This creates the potential for the job to end up being challenging to handle, as well as we consequently suggest paying attention to how your project management platform is utilized at this phase. If you can, make use of features such as task lists, which support the intricacy of the task while preserving the use of the project monitoring system.

Stage # 5: Finally, Launching the Project

Launching the project and the work leading up to it can be a fantastic time for the web development team. However, this is the awful phase of all in which to take your eye off the ball.

In this phase, the testing phase is repeated and covers the facts of the website ranging from Search Engine Optimization to security. In many cases, these inspections might include external stakeholders such as search advertising experts. Any problems increased throughout testing require to be made into tasks, which can be designated to staff members who can resolve them.

Now, you will be ready to transfer control of the web project to the client. This, in itself, includes a degree of intricacy, so make sure to develop dedicated jobs for great information, such as creating the completion report for the task and safely transferring login credentials to the client.

Ever-improving project monitoring for website development

Web project management shouldn’t quit as soon as the website is published on the internet. The following crucial action is to review the website results and find out any possibly valuable lessons you can, ahead of the next site project.

This can mean anything from assessing website efficiency to interviewing team members about what they enjoyed or loathed concerning the project administration process.

If you’re always discovering new things and learning about the websites as well as your management, both must keep getting better and better with time.

Originally published at https://www.temok.com on June 9, 2021.