Reduce the Risk of Website Design, Development and Maintenance (2 of 3)
Let’s take a concrete example.
A media company came to us the other day. They have a blueprint for a couple of phases of website development (which is more realistic than most customers are) and wanted a quote. We had a conference call to discuss it. Rather than starting with the blueprint, I started by asking about their business and why they’re creating a website.
It turns out that they’re main goal is to sell subscriptions. They’re building a great prospect base but, for a variety of operational reasons, it’s not big enough to start marketing to it yet. It needs to be about four times as large as it is. The blueprint, even phase one, assumed that they were ready to pull the trigger on advertising relatively soon, even though it’s taken them about six months to get where they are.
As a quick aside, from just reading their blueprints, I’m betting that in their mind, the main challenge was getting the mechanics in place to sell subscriptions. The mechanics of that are relatively easy. My own experience is that developing the marketing base or interest level in a product or service is much more difficult than the mechanics. But they’re better at that than I am so they were probably designing based on their unknowns.
So, given that it’s taken six months to get where they are and they have to quadruple that, my recommendation was to first tackle the problem of building their prospect base. Rather than building the whole site, add a little to what they already have and see if that propels growth. When that growth reaches a certain point, then they should start developing the specialized content and the subscription infrastructure. One of the big benefits of this is that they only spend a little bit now and get to see what happens.
June 8th, 2006 at 1:11 am
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