As the newest member of the LMD team, I’m wrapping up my first 3 months here and just finished my first full web project as a member of the LMD web team. It was a pretty in-depth site redesign, with a hard deadline of delivery on June 30. To say that I was a bit nervous about how we would build an entire site from scratch in two months is a significant understatement!
There were a few key factors that made this process a smooth transition—and while I would love to take credit for all of them, I have to give props to our client for contributing to the project’s success. Here are some specific elements that made this a painless project from start to finish:
- We created a shared slack channel with the client. This allowed the LMD team to stay in constant communication with the client—without a huge tax on our time. If we had a question about how something was organized, or the client needed us to change a field or how the content was displayed, we could just send a quick slack message and get an answer pretty quickly. It didn’t require a meeting or a phone call and was much faster than having a conversation over email.
- We spent quality time looking through the content and building the relationships between different types of content. This one is really important for us to get right. It doesn’t help anyone if we build a good-looking site that’s difficult to use. No one wants to update the same information in many different places. By taking some extra time to go through content modeling with clients and ask in-depth questions about how they update the site, how users are interacting with the site, and what they’re trying to communicate, LMD was able to build a site that allows the client to enter information once and have it show up everywhere you need it. It’s a little more upfront time, but will save hours in the long run.
- The client had the time and resources to populate content on their site. This was HUGE. The client’s team made content population a priority and cleared space in their schedule to give the migration process the attention it needed. Content population is always one of the biggest hurdles to launching a website on time, and having strong client investment in this process made it a breeze for this project. We were able to see where site architecture needed to be adjusted, make style tweaks, and get feedback from the client on what was easy to use and what could work better for them. Having their actual content in the site as we were doing final polishes helped us deliver a better product that we knew met our stated goals and the client could be confident in using.
Finally, a well-architected website can only come to life if the client is as involved in the process as we are, and are open about their goals and aspirations for their organization. In the process, they share why they love what they do—and that passion inspires us. At LMD, we’re constantly meeting new people who do interesting work—and it’s thrilling to help make this part of their work easier for them.
If your web presence needs a change—whether an update or a complete overhaul, we would love to work with you to build something great.