Fresh

Growing up, my mom always stressed the importance of having great undergarments upon which to build your wardrobe. Bras and panties had to match, and it was ideal if the set matched your full outfit. She said, “If you feel good in your underwear, you’ll look great in your entire outfit.”

The same principle applies to website planning. Now, I’m not suggesting that websites wear bras and panties, but each of the websites that we design and build have certain, ahem, undergarments. These undergarments are the building blocks of a good website wardrobe.

If you think about it, planning for a website is like planning what to wear each day. With an outfit, it’s usually your mood or what’s clean that dictates what colors, tops, bottoms and accessories you’ll wear. With a website, it’s your marketing objectives and business goals that define what outfit your website will wear. These two things – defined marketing objectives and business goals – drive the planning process for a new website project, and a site’s success is based on how well these two things are achieved.

So, before moving forward, let’s take a look at our comparisons and see how they’re shaping up:

Undergarments = a website’s plan

Regular clothes and accessories = a website’s design

Your body = a website’s development and code

One might make the mistake in thinking that undergarments are not a necessity in wardrobe planning. I beg to differ! The right undergarments either make or break an outfit, and I take the same stance with website planning; without making the marketing objectives and business goals a priority, and defining a plan on how to best execute these two things, a website will surely fail.  For some clients, these marketing objectives might be increasing email sign-ups online or boosting online membership; business goals might include converting customers to paid subscribers (if currently trial users) or growing online sales by 30%. How will your team map back to these objectives and goals throughout the project if they don’t exist? How will we measure success without them?

It’s easy to be excited about an outfit, and simply forget to put on underwear in the morning (let’s be honest, hasn’t everyone done this at some point?). It’s easy to overlook the planning process, too – it’s not the sexy part of a project that people actually get to see (that would be design) or the finale once everything comes together (that would be development). Regardless of the sex appeal or the theatrics, it’s the foundation of a project and absolutely necessary for a project’s success.

My hunch is that it’s difficult to figure out what undergarments our websites’ should wear, and that this is why it’s easily overlooked. This kind of planning requires asking our clients tough questions, narrowly identifying those things that need to happen on the website to achieve their goals and objectives, and placing a certain level of responsibility on the team to constantly keep these goals and objectives top of mind throughout the life of the project.

Above all else, we want our clients’ websites to look good and perform well, and to do so their sites need the appropriate undergarments. As their website partner, this also makes us their Undergarment Consultants. Who needs a Bra Specialist at Victoria’s Secret when you have an Undergarment Consultant at eROI?