David Hobbs's Blog, page 3
April 25, 2014
Communicating website migration concerns
Do you have concerns about your upcoming website migration? Do you feel that you need to better communicate these concerns? I suggest following these steps (you can also download the flowchart as a one-pager):
1. Communicate impacts and alternatives
The first step is to communicate two things:
The impact of the current plan
Alternatives
Sometimes all that's needed is to clearly articulate an alternative approach. So for example let's say that you are concerned th...
April 22, 2014
Visualizing the impact
Teams frequently agree to digital strategies without understanding the impact of those agreements. The downside: these strategies often cannot be implemented or will not meet business goals.
Qualitative illustrations of impact to confirm buy-in
In general everyone has fairly highly honed skills for visualizing (and receiving the message of) the positive impact of changes, so here I will concentrate on visualizing the costs of making big changes as well as the disadvantages of not taking act...
January 22, 2014
It's not about post-launch either: Principles of constant change
From launch tunnel vision to constant change
As an industry we focus way too much on big launches and redesigns. I'm certainly not new in saying that, and in fact in some ways it is almost cliche to note this. But I would like to go beyond that to both define some principles of constant change (in this article) and how to do stay focused during change (in my upcoming book Website Product Management: Keeping Focused During Change).
First let's look at why we want to move away from t...
January 15, 2014
What to do with that request to improve your website
Your site faces a constant stream of possible changes. How do you decide what to do? Let's look at the life of a requested website change (or download the one-page flowchart).
The request itself
Obviously there are lots of sources of possible change, but in this case we'll look at a requests for specific changes from a site user or backend content contributor (for example, to add personalization features to a page). One of the main things you want to do when evaluating the reque...
November 25, 2013
Ongoing change: fast and slow
When making changes to your web presence, some things should happen quickly, and some should happen slowly. Change that is routine and standardized should be fast -- for example, publishing a routine webpage update should happen quickly. But other changes should be more considered. If someone is requesting raw HTML access to their page so they can add a new feature to their web page (pe...
October 15, 2013
Cheer or jeer? Did that slick new website help?
Question: What’s a great way to have your company’s web presence spiral out of control?
Answer: Launching one-off sites.
But from the rank-and-file to top executives usually applaud one-offs. Why?
They are relatively easy to create.
They can be massaged exactly how you want them, without worrying about existing structures, negotiating, etc.
In other words, they can be created quickly and look great! They can even seem like a bright life boat against the backdrop of the huge...
October 3, 2013
Mind the gap: quality differences in your web presence
You are faced with a continuum of possible quality on your web presence, probably with some sections currently being high quality and others being lower quality. To illustrate this, let's use four circles to highlight the quality level for four main sections of a site (of course, your site would be sliced and placed on the scale differently).
Notably, this represents the way things are on your website. You will also have some targets, with potentially some official standards as...
July 30, 2013
What to do since you can't future-proof
I think sometimes we look at the latest trend and have tunnel vision that our solutions for that new thing is our solution for the future as well.
But however much we may like our latest solution, it will need to change over time. In this blog post, we’ll briefly look at why that’s the case and then cover four things you can do to better respond to the future.
You can’t future-proof
In the upcoming webinar we’ll look at more reasons you can’t future-proof, but...
July 25, 2013
Long term engagement funnels
Are you optimizing your web presence (not just your main web site) for transactions, or relationships? Given the immediacy of the web, especially in how easy it is to do stuff, it’s easy to think short term. For instance, you may do something that increases the percentage of visits that people buy your main product (optimizing the single transaction checkout funnel). This clearly is important, but I would encourage you to think longer term, not just concentrating on the single transact...
July 24, 2013
It's not (only) about the site visitor
When maintaining, improving, or radically changing your website (or the underlying platform), there are lots of stakeholders involved. Also, the stakes are high since it’s really easy to implement things in a way that is not flexible or otherwise doesn’t really serve the organization well. One problem is the temptation to oil the squeeky wheel, giving undue attention to power users when basic CMS users and external site visitors are more important.
But the only reason to have a we...
