As a website development and online marketing company we hear an abundance of questions from a multitude of business owners. Most common are issues about how long it takes to get websites built, their campaigns to start converting, and why they can never seem to get track their marketing company down. There may be a wide variety of reasons for not getting things completed on the agreed upon timeline, so here we will explore a few of the ones we have seen, from inside the industry.
Your Type of Website
Every website is different, and the type of website you need is a large determining factor in how long it will take to build. We can’t count the number of times someone comes to us and says, it’s an easy website, or it should be a quick website build. This is an indication that someone already has a predetermined notion of how long a site should take, and often that isn’t the same for the website developer.
A major part of any industry is making something challenging appear to be simple and straightforward. Depending on the type of website you want designed, it may be easy comparatively, but the basic structure of the site is likely to take the same amount of time to build, regardless of what type of site it is.
For different types of sites, there are different requirements that take a fair portion of time. A shopping cart for instance is a specific amount of work to build and integrate, and a members or login section of a site is a different amount of work. Images, for instance, will generally take 1-2 minutes each to scan and load. This doesn’t include the time it takes to tag or resize each image. Have 100 images? Just scanning and loading them can take about 3 hours.
Changing the Scope of Work
The largest challenge for website developers is often a client not having a clear idea of what they want, or changing their mind in the middle of a project. As a website development company we take the time to sit and speak with our clients directly about their needs, and site goals. Occasionally a client comes back to us, after the project has been started, and wants to change their site goals or focus. While we, like most developers, are happy to go back and make changes to fit the current need, it ultimately changes the scope of work. Doing this even once can cause a project to fall behind drastically.
To prevent this type of a delay in website development, it is suggested to have a clear idea of who your company or organization is, what your goals are for your website, and relay anything you would like the site to be able to achieve in the future. Even if your future need is only a possibility, it is easier to develop with those items in mind, rather than create it after the fact. We always suggest knowing these three items for at least a few weeks before development, to ensure that it covers all your needs.
What You Should Expect
Any website development company worth their salt with give you milestones and expectations of timelines. They should communicate with you often and give you updates between these milestones to keep you engaged in the process. Should something happen that causes the timeline to change, they should advise you of this and give you a new timeline. You have a business to run, and they do too. Respect flows both ways, and if you aren’t getting the respect you give, this is a clear indicator of a much larger problem that should be addressed.
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