In the digital world of today, websites have a prominent place. They represent the face of your business and function as its window to the outside world, online. More importantly, they also act as among the first touch-points for your existing and potential customers.
With so much at stake, the success of the website development project is critical.
But unfortunately, many times, website development projects fail and fall by the wayside. (Why Web Development Projects Get Failed?)
Has yours too encountered such a situation?
If so, there could be some major reasons responsible for the failure of your website development project.
Reasons for Failure
Your website development failure could be due to either one or more of the following reasons. (7 Key Reasons Where Website Development Projects Fail)
Over-Reliance on Visual Design
Too often, website development projects have failed due to excess focus on creating a design that’s appealing to the eyeballs while completely neglecting the real factors that are crucial for maximizing its success potential.
Web developers tend to neglect the actual reasons for the development of the website, why it’s being designed, and for what purpose it’s meant. This happens when no analysis has been undertaken to understand the purpose of design in line with the unique requirements of the client’s business or the inability to understand the user’s tendencies for using a website and their viewpoints with regard to UX. A proper understanding is what will give a clear picture of the exact content and functional essentials required to be a part of the UI architecture that in reality supplements the design of the website.
Once that’s done, then it would make it easy for the web developer team to coordinate with the design team and come up with a website design that’s functional as well as visually stimulating.
Inept Developers with Improper Understanding
It’s critical to have skilled and creative web developers as part of the development team, who understand what needs to be done and what is required to get them done. Too often, many individual developers tend to forget the basic needs and instead focus on aspects that have little or no relevance to the website development.
Instead of having web developers who are jack of all trades but masters of none, it is better to have web developers with specializations in multiple disciplines with a crystal clear plan. This way, the work can be supplemented better and executed faster with successful results.
Unclear Source Coding
Source code control is critical for developing a sound website. Lack of it has often resulted in the sudden collapse of website development projects. Such situations are akin to a rudderless ship without direction. Proper control is essential for developers to support, create, or update the source code files from time to time.
To exercise greater control, it’s vital to have a proper source-control system in place for project work to blend successfully and eventually produce a website that is robust and functional.
Poor Project Management
Professional project management is important. Without it, a project tends to lose its direction and the actual focus that comes with it. Many times, website development projects have failed due to a lack of proper project management.
Professional project management with the right leadership in place will help streamline the whole project work process, from planning to execution, monitoring, and completion of the project.
Poor Quality Assurance / User Testing
They say quality matters a lot. That’s true. Similarly, a website’s quality is what ultimately counts at the end of a website development project. Many projects fail due to poor quality assurance tests performed on websites. As a result, bugs and errors still continue to be present on the websites and create issues stalling their proper functioning.
The need of the hour is to have a robust quality assurance team with the best test systems in place to conduct periodic tests during the website development project phase. This will help instantly spot bugs and errors that may have otherwise crept into the website, and instant action is taken to fix them or altogether weed them out.
Poor user testing has often resulted in the failure of website development projects. Without a proper user testing system in place, you cannot get user feedback about the website – whether the website is properly communicating your brand and product messages to the users the way it is intended to convey; or users are able to find the information they need properly; or users funnel journey is able to reach the conversion point; and above all, the website is providing value to the user or not.
The sudden shift in priorities midway through the project too has resulted in the collapse of website development projects. This can happen from lapses in communication within the development team and improper understanding of the nature of the project. As a result, the people and resources of a team get shifted to another project or allocated to another area of the business. Eventually, they result in missed deadlines.
Final Words
There is no secret panacea for the success of a website development project. The only way out is proper planning, proper communication flow, and proper attention to detail, at every stage of the project. And, of course, a proper team with the proper priorities in place. All of these will help avoid unexpected delays, over-shooting of project costs, and ultimately, website development project failures.