Nine takeaways from our own website project

Hopefully, you’ll notice something different about our website. We recently re-platformed, refreshed the design and overhauled the content. However, we haven’t made a lot of noise about this as the new site isn’t a spectacular reinvention or any kind of revolutionary build, but more of an MVP and starting point for continuous improvement. To be completely honest we were also a little self-conscious that the design and structure of the previous iteration had not been updated for a long time. 
In this blog we’re going to explore some takeaways from the project.  All of these are reminders of things we already know because we see them commonly occurring across the work we do with our clients, but for us it was interesting to reflect on these patterns relating to our own web project.

1. You need to match the right CMS for your project 

Every website is powered by a content management system (CMS) or a digital experience platform (DXP). There is a lot of choice in the highly competitive CMS and DXP market and there will always be a “best fit” platform for your site objectives, budget, future path, and team. 
The 3chillies website is a relatively straightforward site which describes who we are, what we offer and houses our blog. The previous iteration was based on Sitecore and was heavily templated. Sitecore is an excellent choice for a complex law firm website for example, but its sheer power is not really needed for a straightforward site with a relatively small amount of content. The templated approach also meant it was harder for someone less experienced with the CMS to upload content. 
We made an early decision to use a hosted version of Umbraco utilising one of its out-of-the-box themes as a starting point to enable speed to market, reduce costs and make it super easy for anyone to add content with the highly user-friendly Umbraco CMS . It is an excellent fit for a straightforward project like the 3chillies website.

2. Going for an MVP is easier operationally

We also made a decision to go for an MVP launch. At 3chillies we can get very busy and any of us can get pulled in to work on a client project; our website was always going to be secondary and more of a project to fit around wider client needs. 
We felt that striving for perfection would mean we might never launch, and we also had the relative luxury of not having a forced launch date upon us for example with a CMS license expiring. An MVP approach is not suitable for every website project, but it was absolutely right for the new 3chillies website.

3. The content always takes longer than you think

If there is one unwritten law of websites that always seems to be true, it’s that creating, organising and optimising the content always takes longer than think. We’ve seen milestones extended, delivery dates moved, and extra content resources parachuted in on multiple web projects. And so, perhaps inevitably, our content took longer to create than anticipated, pushing back our target delivery date several weeks. 
There are multiple reasons for this including very busy people having to review content, additional content needs emerging as the project progressed and a rethink on content structure on how we presented content relating to our services and our focus technologies.

4. Give your site a bit of front-end love

We used a templated site as a head start that already allows considerable flexibility for design configuration.  But every site needs those styling improvements, little touches and design flourishes that elevate the experience, reflect your brand, and make a difference.  One of our front-end developers more or less demanded that he was able to let loose on the site and he made significant improvements. Every website needs that front-end attention that invariably proves to be an “ingredient X” that improves it.

5. Never forget the redirects

Redirects are an important part of any website. You don’t want to lose those links from others or impact your hard-earned SEO. We got out the spreadsheet, mapped the new pages to the old and put the work on to make sure the required redirects were properly in place at launch.

6. A website project forces decisions about how you go to market  

A new website usually means content being bang up to date, but it can also force teams to think about issues such as what exactly are the core services offered, how these are branded, what a company’s employee value proposition is and more. These decisions are not ideal to rush and need proper thought which also adds to the length of time content can take to create. It really helps to think about these upfront if you can.
Deciding on these took a couple of sessions and some iteration as content itself was reviewed. We also decided to expand on these in the coming months – for example we plan to evolve our Career pages.

7. Get your tagging right

The tagging on our previous site was a little all over the place, so the new site forced a rethink. We wanted to ensure that we could dynamically reference blog posts on relevant service and technology pages as well as eventually case studies. We looked at the existing tagging on our blog posts, figured what was missing based on topics covered and mapped these to our new service and technology pages. We’ve now got a renewed set of tags which works harder for us and also is helping us to identify the balance of content we have on the blog, and which areas are less well covered.

8. Everyone dislikes having their photo taken

At 3chillies we are consistently proud of our amazing team, and we wanted to include everyone’s photos on the site. While that idea wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms by staff, we decided initially to at least include photos of the leadership team.  Despite opportunities to do this there always seemed to be someone not around or ever so reluctant because they were not quite “looking their best”. In the end it was one of the last actions we completed before launch.

9. A website project is never finished

If you manage a website, you’ll know this. A website project is never truly finished – and that is sometimes understood from day one if you’re delivering an MVP. There are things that fall out of scope, new ideas that emerge during a build, content that wasn’t quite finished, things that come about from feedback, and a backlog that’s built up. That is certainly true of our website which has an inevitable “to do” list.

Websites are go!

We were glad to complete this project and get a new version of the 3chillies website live. If you’d like to discuss your website project, then get in touch.