Web Site Redesign: Use Existing Staff, an Outside Consultant or Both?

I have been on all sides of this one throughout my career and, frankly, some of the recommendations I am going to make here are not going to be popular with all of my friends and former co-workers.

If your re-design project is for a mission critical website and you have internal staff who are responsible for the management, design, maintenance or performance of the site its not a good idea to put them solely in charge of a redesign or to make them the primary/only contact with any outside vendors, contractors or firms you may want to bring in to work on the project.

Here are the reasons.

• Internal staff are usually too close to see the issues clearly. In addition, they are often convinced that no one from outside can see or ever understand the issues they face.
• Internal staff are territorial and usually defensive. They are likely to assume that the desire for change is a reflection on the quality of their work. Often its not.
• Internal staff are usually focused on their specialty (IT, Marketing, Design) so their solutions will reflect a narrow focus.
• Internal staff are usually stuck in the trenches. A redesign project will likely never happen. You may get a facelift. You may get individual parts repaired. They simply don’t have the time for a more extensive change. If you hire extra staff hoping to free up some time for the redesign project the new staff member will usually get sucked into the vortex of daily tasks too. This ends up being an awfully expensive solution to the problem. Think about this one for a minute. If your existing staff had time to take on a large redesign project then their current daily load isn’t enough to warrant a full time salary. I’m assuming that is not the case – you wouldn’t have full time employees if there wasn’t a full plate of issues for them to address.

What do I recommend?

A senior staff member should be placed in charge of decision making and should serve as the conduit through which communications between outside consultants and internal staff occur. All of the internal stakeholders should be involved to some degree – with Marketing and IT primarily in charge of implementation.

Why?

Designing or redesigning a website is not an IT project and it shouldn’t be only a marketing project. You wouldn’t want a mechanic to design your car and you wouldn’t want a decorator building your engine. Marketing and IT will have the “broken part list” and the project will benefit from both points of view.

A really successful (public or external) site is partly a marketing tool, partly a solution to business problems and, in addition, needs to run smoothly, be constantly available and secure. To achieve that you need the participation and input of several internal staff members or departments and you need the overall view that only a good outside consultant can bring.

Where do you start?

• Identify the target audience.
• Identify the business problem(s) you want to solve.
• Determine how to best meet the needs of your business and your audience.

Then your outside consultant can recommend a solution that should address all of the needs and requirements. The important stakeholders have all been part of the process with no one area pulling the project too far in the wrong direction.