The 4 Champions That Will Successfully Deliver A Website

Building a new website, whether for the first time or the tenth time, can be a daunting task. It isn’t just a case of designing a pretty layout, coding it into a website then putting it live for all the world to marvel at.

But if you’ve ever experienced any part of a web project, then I’m sure you’ll already know that…

In my experience of working in digital marketing, I’ve seen web projects that have run into problems, taken longer than predicted, failed to deliver real long-term results, or just fizzled out into nothing. Apart from the obvious lessons learned from these experiences, it has become apparent to me that for a website project to succeed AND to produce a website that delivers real results, you need a team of Champions on board.

Let’s meet them…

The Customer Champion

The truth about web design is often hard to swallow for clients. Like it or not – what you like, want and ‘need’ your website to look like is actually secondary to the preferences, desires and requirements of your customers.
The Customer Champion is the person who has an unbiased picture of what the customer expects from a website and how they will interact with it, making decisions on design style and functionality based on customer research and insight.

This includes content, structure, landing pages, routes onto the site, and pathways to ‘conversion’.
Sometimes a business will have an accurate idea of their customer needs, but it is easy for client-side stakeholders to get carried away with personal preferences (especially about design) and make decisions that conflict with the actual needs of the customer, which fundamentally pushes the project in the wrong direction.

One way to incorporate a Customer Champion is to employ your actual customers for the role – either through split testing different designs to gauge popularity and success, or more directly by just asking your audience what they expect from your website. In addition, in the scenario where you are replacing an existing site with a new one, don’t underestimate the value of your analytics data. The behaviour of your current audience can give extremely insightful clues into what works for them if analysed correctly.

The Brand Champion

Your brand is much more than just a logo and a visual look and feel, it is an identity that truly defines your business, its aims and its ethos.

More than ever, customers expect to be able to identify with the brands they engage with – not necessarily at a “I can relate to these guys because they are like me” level, but in the way that the customer understands and is comfortable with their engagements with that brand.

The Brand Champion understands this, and will ensure that your website is a fair reflection of your company as a whole.

Of the four champions, they may appear to have the easiest job, but that is not necessarily the case. They aren’t just there to make sure your website looks like your printed brochures (in some cases they may want the opposite), they need to establish the tone of your content and the nature of your calls to action, making sure that your website works as a seamless and consistent cog in the bigger picture of your business.

The Business Champion

One of the most commonly overlooked yet crucial questions in regards to websites is ‘what constitutes the success of a website’?

Businesses often use metrics such as number of visitors, bounce rate, page views, time spent the site etc to benchmark and measure performance, but is this enough?

The Business Champion is the guardian of the core goals of the business, and ensures that these are also the core goals of the website. They are not content to use ‘vanity metrics’ like those above to measure the performance of a site, but instead expect the design, content, and structure to drive visitors to ‘conversion’ (whatever form that might take).

The Business Champion will set out to identify what constitutes a conversion on the site (email enquiry, phone call, purchase etc) then to optimise the user experience to promote the routes towards these conversions. They will also be looking to prove the return on any investment in promoting the site, so clear and detailed tracking from source to conversion is a massive priority for them.

If the business owner is going to take one of these four roles, it should be the role of the Business Champion. It sounds obvious, but is often not the case…

The Discoverability Champion

It isn’t news that a well designed and developed website is useless if no one can actually find it.
Visibility is key to the success of any online presence, and this is no longer just limited to search. But ensuring that a website is discoverable through all online channels isn’t something that comes after the site is designed and built, it is a key factor to consider at the very start of the project.

The Discoverability Champion understands that high visibility relies on high quality content and a well-optimised site. They will be adamant that not only should content strategy and site structure be established before any design starts, but that these factors will guide the design and build of the website.

So the Discoverability Champion is interested in ensuring that your website is ready to make best use of the relevant content you create to drive traffic and enquiries through the website. They will expect the design and coding to be favourable to search engines, and that the sitemap and structure work from a technical perspective.

Possibly the most ‘techie’ of all, you should expect that your web developer fits the mould of the Discoverability Champion.
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It may seem that these four stakeholders are bound to clash in some ways, but it is essential to know that they don’t have to take the form of four different people doing battle over a meeting table.

No matter how big or small your web team is, the main ingredient for success is to keep all these critical factors in mind when planning and implementing your project. One person could potentially fulfil all the above roles (although I’ve yet to meet that person…), but as long as you understand the importance of each of them, you’ll be on the road to a successful website.

Far from being an afterthought, it should also be noted that in addition to these four champions, you also need talented designers and a web developers – but that’s a given, right?
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