How To Build A Website Project Plan Like a Top Web Design Agency

There's a lot of reasons for this, many of them unnecessary delays. This is why we (and a lot of other agencies) have adopted a Growth-Driven Design approach to website launches.

The key to building and launching an Effective Website On-Budget, and on time, is the website project plan. With the right processes and plan in place, you can bypass a lot of those common pitfalls that overcomplicate and derail web design projects.

We've helped a ton of brands launch New Website Designs over the years, and we've come up with our own system of website project plans.

How to Build a Website Project Plan

The most common misconception that leads to a messed up website project, is thinking website design is only graphical.

It's way more than that - or at least it should be.

If you want pretty graphics, just download a template and try to replicate the graphics. What you'll discover is that it doesn't perform - as in, your customers don't engage with it, they don't become leads, and it doesn't drive an increase in paying customers.

If you don't believe me, you are free to try it out. We've seen it over and over again. People invest thousands of dollars on "pretty" and then come to us needing help sometimes the same year they launched their new website.

Why?

Because a website that drives customers requires a whole lot more than pretty graphics.

You have to start with the Customer Story and move on from there. And it gets complicated. It gets confusing. And, without a map, you could get frustrated and lost.

Thankfully, there is a map. Some people call it the website project plan.

Why do you need a website project plan? Simply put, you need a website project plan because, without it, you'll be in for a long, hard journey. But, with it, you can build and launch a high-performance website without unnecessary struggles.

The website project plan is your North Star.

It's your blueprint.

With the following steps, you can Build A Website project plan that keeps you on track and aligned with your overall business objectives.

Step #1: Set Yourself Up for Success

Before you get too deep into your website project, take a beat to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success. You can accomplish this be ensuring you have three vital elements in place: 

1. The Right Team: Do you have the all-star players you need to create an amazing website? You’ll need developers, designers, copywriters, and team members capable of analyzing performance to get off on the right foot.  
2. The Right Leader: No project can proceed in an organized fashion without a project manager. Ensure the person leading your website project team is the person you want at the helm. 
3. The Right Tool: If you don’t have the right website platform in place, building an incredible website will be harder than it needs to be—if not utterly impossible. We recommend HubSpot, but as long as you’re picking a tool that you know works for your team, you’ll set yourself up for victory here. 

This stage is also where you’ll want to set up a timeline and establish the various phases of the project. Ensure that your entire team is on the same page and ready to tackle the project as a single unified force. 

Step #2: Understand Your Customers

To build a website that will drive conversions and attract new visitors, you've got to understand your ideal customers. That sounds like a tall order since there are so many attributes that make up your customers. It's difficult to focus on all of them, which is why we use concise strategy templates.

These templates will help you Refine Buyer Personas, and include:

• Buyer Personas: A lot of teams go too far with buyer personas, with a lot of information that isn't particularly useful or relevant. No one on your marketing team is going to leaf through 6-7 pages of insights whenever they need some guidance. You should only focus on the most critical aspects of your customers. This Buyer Persona Template From HubSpot helps you accomplish that.
• Business Model Canvas: The Business Model Canvas is a one-page document that walks through the core problems, experiences, and trigger events that lead to your solution. Using all of this information, you can get a clearer idea of the fears, hesitations, frustrations, and assumptions that your customers make about your company and industry.
• Customer Journey Map: The Customer Journey Map exercise puts you right in your customer's shoes. You can see the brand experience from their point of view. Sometimes, it's not pretty, but through this exercise, you can identify tactics to improve or enhance the customer experience.
• Customer Journey Map: For each persona, you will walk through the awareness, interest, desire, consideration, and decision stages. As we like to put it, it's the content that will bait and hook leads, reel them in, and eventually transform them into a customer. Using this information, you can create messaging that is irresistible to your target customers.

By the end of this exercise, you will have everything you need to craft a brand narrative. The brand narrative will Inform A Website Strategy and website content, which is the first step to a GDD website build. 

Step #3: Plan Your Messaging

Strong messaging goes beyond great copy.

It requires a plan of every website page we'll create, and the goal for each page. We begin with the initial pages we plan on building, that provide information about our company, discuss our core offers, and educate the customer about our solution.

These pages include:

Entry Pages

The entry pages will be the first impression you'll make on potential customers. These include your home page and various lead generation landing pages. You should go above and beyond on these pages when it comes to developing messaging. HubSpot has collected a ton of Exceptional Examples Of Landing Pages you can use for inspiration.

Content Pillar Pages

Pillar pages are viral in marketing right now. Every brand is jumping on board, with companies like Buffer to HubSpot executing flawless, incredibly valuable pillar pages. Essentially, pillar pages each cover one of 3-4 broad topics that cover your areas of expertise.

These pages take a lot of work, but with a lot of positive effort, they pay off tremendously. With a great concept and excellent content, you can demonstrate your value and expertise in your industry, all while improving your SEO rankings.

(The HubSpot Pillar Page talks about robots. It's cool.)

Belief Pages

You can find exceptional, engaged customers with belief pages. These pages demonstrate your core values. Here at Lean Labs, we're excited and enthusiastic about building great websites. It's why we do any of this in the first place. So on our service pages, we put all of that out there.

We don't skirt over our values to get more customers. We focus on building long-lasting relationships with leads with a similar perspective about websites, and these belief pages help us find them.

Buyer Journey Pages

Buyer journey pages will help get customers from point A to point B. Over time, we'll rely on buyer journey pages to help increase organic traffic, nurture leads, and bring in more sales opportunities. With highly effective buyer journey pages, motivated customers will move through our funnel faster.

Conversion Pages

These are The Pages That Sell. These pages provide clarity to your more qualified leads, helping them understand what all of your products and services are, why customers need it, what they'll get from those services, and how to buy it.

When planning which conversion pages you need, think through the products and services you offer. Can they pay for those services online? Can they buy those products online? Do they need to do a demo first?

These questions will help inform where those pages need to link to, and other pages you might need to build.

Legalese

These pages aren't exciting, but they're necessary to have. For these pages, you'll cover Privacy Policy and Terms of Use content to protect your brand. These pages can be a gray area for most people. If you need legalese pages, consult a lawyer, or Do Your Research. Every industry is different, so there's not a one-size-fits-all approach for this part.

After deciding the pages we need, we document them and draft a sitemap. A sitemap looks like a grid and determines the hierarchy of your pages. Which pages will link to the navigation, for example? What pages do we need to support content offers or free trials? We use Slickplan to build site maps, and Mockflow is another excellent tool.

With the sitemap planned out, you're ready to plan the content of your website pages. You can use A Tool Like SprocketRocket to create a framework for each page. SprocketRocket features an array of modules, such as calls-to-action, headers, and testimonials that you can select and arrange to style your page. The tool automatically populates those modules in a HubSpot website page draft, making it easy to add in the copy.

Step #4: Design and Development 

Once you write, edit, and put website copy into your page drafts, pass them to a designer to style headlines, add images and video, and insert calls-to-actions. You can also use one of many Free HubSpot Templates to accelerate the design process.

The design and development step is where you’ll consider the various site elements and functionality you need to incorporate to succeed. Consider site organization, navigation bars, CTAs, buttons, and more in additon to page style.

Remember: There is a difference between a “pretty” website and a “high-converting” website. The most visually stunning website is still useless if visitors aren’t guided toward a clear and compelling next step toward engaging with your brand. 

Step #5: Launch Fast and Prepare to Iterate

If you follow our approach to putting together a website project plan, you'll end up with a site that's pretty close to being perfect. However, we never recommend just launching sites and being satisfied with "close to perfect." You should always be optimizing the Performance Of Your Website.

Over time, things will break, and customer preferences will change. If you don't pay attention to how the site is performing, eventually, you'll need to do another redesign or refresh. So when we put together our website project plan, we plan to optimize over time. We set goals and objectives for ongoing updates and testing.

After launch, let traffic run through it for a while, then use a series of tools to measure performance. These tools include all of the Performance Tools HubSpot Offers, and heat mapping and screen recording tools such as Optimizely and CrazyEgg. With those tools, we see how our customers are interacting with pages and judge where we can make optimizations.

Common Website Project Plan Mistakes To Avoid

Following the five steps outlined above can help start you on the path to success, but you'll want to understand your guardrails before you get started. What are the pitfalls you should avoid when starting a new website project? 

Here are six critical challenges to be aware of:

• Lack of Clear Objectives: Many businesses fail to define specific goals for their redesign. Without clear objectives, efforts can become misaligned, leading to wasted resources and ineffective outcomes. Establishing concrete, measurable goals before starting the redesign process is crucial.
• Inadequate Research and Planning: Skipping thorough research on user needs and market trends can result in ineffective solutions and missed opportunities. Comprehensive research provides invaluable insights that inform design decisions and strategy.
• Overlooking Mobile Optimization: With the increasing prevalence of mobile browsing, failing to ensure mobile-friendliness can significantly impact user experience and engagement. A responsive design that performs well across all devices is critical to your site's success. 
• Inconsistent Branding: Not maintaining consistent branding elements across the site can lead to confusion and a weakened brand identity. Cohesive visual elements, messaging, and tone reinforce brand recognition and trust - crucial elements of any site build. 
• Neglecting SEO Best Practices: Failing to integrate SEO considerations into the redesign can result in lower search engine rankings and reduced visibility. It's important to consider site structure, content strategy, and technical SEO elements throughout the redesign process.
• Ignoring Analytics and Feedback: Not using data and user feedback to guide decisions can lead to missed insights for continuous improvement. Regularly analyzing user behavior and gathering feedback provides valuable direction for ongoing optimization.

By addressing these challenges head-on, you can create a more effective, user-friendly website that aligns with your goals and meets the needs of your target audience.

Essential Website Project Tools

If you want your website project to succeed, you need to approach it with more than just a game plan: You need the right tools. 

What tools should you and your team explore before kicking off your project? Let's explore four different types of tools every web project needs to succeed. We'll talk about why each type of tool matters and give you some recommendations. 

• Project Management Tools: These tools help teams organize tasks, collaborate effectively, and track progress throughout the redesign process. Key features typically include task management, team collaboration capabilities, and timeline tracking.
  • Example: ClickUp
• Design Tools: Essential for creating the visual elements and user interface of the new website. These tools offer can help you with tasks like wireframing, prototyping, modular site building, and design collaboration, enabling designers to create and iterate on designs efficiently.
  • Examples: Figma, Sprocket Rocket
• Development Tools: These are crucial for implementing the design and functionality of the website. Common tools include Visual Studio Code for code editing, GitHub for version control, and Docker for containerization. These tools help developers write, manage, and deploy code effectively.
  • Example: GitHub
• Testing Tools: Critical for ensuring the quality and performance of the redesigned website. These tools offer features like automated testing, performance analysis, and accessibility checks, helping teams identify and resolve issues before launch.
  • Example: Selenium

By combining these tools, your team can manage your website design project more effectively. You can collaborate more efficiently, create better designs, implement them more efficiently, and take steps to ensure the quality of the final site before go-live.  

Implementing The Website Project Plan

A website is a considerable investment, and that's why it's so important to get it right. By taking a more data-driven, customer-centric approach, you'll build a website that can grow with your company and help hit your goals. So while our website project plan has a lot of moving parts, we're confident that it's the best possible approach to web design.

We've spent years refining our website design project plan. But a website project is only one piece of the puzzle. To truly crush your goals and achieve massive growth, you’ll need a full playbook that aligns all your marketing efforts. That’s where we come in. 

Our Growth Marketing Playbook gives you all the tools and plays you need to launch a high-converting site and use it to scale growth for your business reliably. Check out the Growth Marketing Playbook for free today!