Why Your Web Design Project Needs Discovery

Isaiah Bollinger

Isaiah Bollinger

Trying to build a website without discovery is like trying to build a house without an architectural design or blueprint. You might end up spending thousands of dollars and not getting at all what you wanted.
Discovery is one of the most important parts of any web design or software project. One of the most frustrating things I see in the web design industry are businesses simply asking for proposals and quotes without even really knowing what they need. Its impossible to give an accurate quote on a project when you haven’t properly identified everything you will actually be doing in the project!
To really quote accurately, you need to know the very specific details of the project, otherwise it will either be a grossly overestimated quote to be safe or in other cases a major underestimation to get the sale which can lead to projects not being completed due to lack of budget.
The problem is, most companies requesting a proposal don’t have the in house expertise to properly assess this information, especially since they will most likely make decisions that will not fit within their budget. If they had the expertise they would most likely be able to do the project in house to begin with. That is why almost every web project should begin with proper discovery from experts who can actually scope out all of the details of the project for execution.

Ultimately, discovery will help you:

  • Determine the actual project objectives and goals
  • Build a realistic timeline
  • Build a realistic budget
  • Build a realistic roadmap for execution
  • Estimate viable return on investment
  • Explore ideas and concepts before investing in execution
  • Get early stage feedback

Without discovery, you risk:

  • Not meeting deadlines
  • Not meeting budget expectations
  • Not ending up with desirable results
  • Hurting relationships with your vendors
  • Ending up with an unmaintainable website
  • Having major bugs and site issues
  • Not getting the features you wanted

Things that need to be determined in discovery:

CMS or Architecture

What platform you use to build your website can drastically increase the price of the website. Simple platforms like Squarespace or Wix are limiting but easy to use and you may be able to get something up cheap and quick. More Enterprise oriented platforms like Drupal and Magento require a lot of work and could take a long time to implement. You may also decide you don’t need a CMS and need a framework like Laravel, which could also change the amount of work required to do what you need to do.

Unique Designs / Page Templates

The number of templates and pages that have to be custom built and designed will greatly influence the cost of the website. Some websites only use a few templates, and larger sites might have hundreds if not more unique templates. Each template will have to be uniquely designed and developed. Therefore determining how many unique templates you will need is critical for understanding the scope of your project.

eCommerce Information if Necessary

eCommerce alone could warrant a major amount of discovery. What payment gateways are you using, shipping methods, how many attributes and SKUs are needed, and so on. eCommerce projects require a large amount of discovery and should really be approximately 5 to 10% of the total budget of the project dedicated to discovery.

Frontend Functionality

A simple frontend with static content will not cost a lot in most cases. However, frontend functionality can be very complex in which complex CSS or Javascript is required and you will need a senior frontend developer to do the work. Paralax scrolling, slideshows, carousels, and other types of interactive content……

Backend Functionality

The backend of your website could be a tremendous amount of work. In most cases, you will need to customize a CMS or framework to not only accommodate the frontend functionality you need, but also how you can control the content or data in the admin panel. Determining all the backend functionality and how it will be executed is a major part of almost every project.

Extensions / Plugins

Chances are, you will be using extensions or plugins to do some of the frontend or backend functionality. Depending on how much work these extensions are to implement, they could drastically impact the cost and timeline of your project.

Integrations / API’s

Integrations are often the hardest part of any project. There are prebuilt integrations to platforms like WordPress and Magento that might take significantly less time to implement that a custom integration. Determining how and what you will be integrating with is crucial to knowing how large a project will be.

Data Transfer

In most cases, you will need to transfer data from your old website or some source to your new website. This can be a lot of work if the data needs to be refactored or manipulated to fit the new database schema and data structure.

SEO

Making sure you determine how you are going to optimize the page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, htacess file, sitemap, and other on page SEO factors are critical for success. Also, determining a redirect plan can be a major project for larger sites.

Content

Content is a huge road blocker in most projects. Making sure a team is in place to create high quality content on time will be a major factor in your project.

Development Operations

Self-hosted platforms require significantly more sys admin and dev ops work than SaaS platforms like Shopify. Budgeting for proper dev ops is crucial to success.

Analytics

How are you tracking site visitors and parts of your website? Do you need to setup custom goals and more advanced analytics tactics?
Ultimately discovery can cover a lot of things, way beyond some of the topics I discussed today. This is really high level stuff and doesn’t even dive into the nitty gritty. The more detailed you get in discovery, the better.

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