This chapter will cover:
- The types of help that’s available for your website and their pros and cons
- How to brief someone in properly about a website project
A bold thing for an agency that helps with websites to say, no? We’re not even saying that most people/organisations are bad at their jobs (although of course some are). What we are saying is that you should be aware of the limitations and incentives for each type of person/organisation that might be helping you with your website.
Why would you need help with your website in the first place?
Things go wrong online very regularly. A lot of things you might be able to solve yourself, or your website builder/host might solve automatically. Sometimes though, this is beyond your ability and you’ll need to get someone else involved. Some percentage of requests to them will be beyond their ability and they will need to engage their own second tier of support. And so forth; you’d be surprised how deep this goes.
Who might be helping and what are their limitations?
| Party | Considerations |
|---|---|
| You | As the business owner/person with whom the buck stops, all things being equal you have the most business context and the most organisational knowledge. Your limitations are probably (1) not enough time, (2) not enough technical knowledge and (3) not enough knowledge of the digital space. Most business owners admit their time and tech limitations quite easily but we’ve found that it’s sometimes hard to admit that you might not know the best thing from a digital strategy perspective. Even though you’re the expert for your vertical, there will come a time when someone’s advice rubs up against your gut instinct. Parts of this book might qualify. There’s no hard and fast rule about who to trust but if you’ve gotten a 2nd opinion or if the other expert has industry experience that should lend additional credence to their advice. |
| In-house staff | Staff are usually better-placed than you to help with a lot of things, depending who they are, and if you can afford in-house staff. The main thing to watch out for is for an organisation that’s small you may be relying on someone whose main focus isn’t websites or digital marketing (eg. they might be doing some admin too), and in that case even if they’re brilliant they may struggle to stay up to date in an industry that’s very fast-paced. |
| Web service support staff | This includes support at your web host, your CMS, your EDM platform (eg. Mailchimp) and so on. The benefit of this is that it’s usually free within your existing payment plan. But this is the drawback. Each company gets an enormous amount of support requests and are always trying to spend as little time per ticket as possible. Prepare as much information as you can to help them quickly understand what you need, and understand that you will have to make time to follow-up until you get it. The support staff also wouldn’t know your business objectives, so if you’re trying to troubleshoot something that ultimately isn’t in your best interest they’re not likely to save you. |
| Agencies/ consultants | Unlike on-demand support, you can develop a relationship with an agency or consultant and they will soon come to learn your business context and therefore their recommendations will be customised. You might also be able to draw on their own support network, for example it might be easier for them to formulate certain support questions for you to pass on. We’re an agency and have seen many different agency models over the years.It’s important to consider if the payment incentives of the model are aligned.
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| Freelancers | The items to be mindful of are similar to agencies/consultants but these are likely to be cheaper. A freelancer however is more likely to be a single person operation which requires even more trust than an agency/company approach. There may also be an intermediary platform such as Upwork involved which can add as an extra insurance policy and/or quality control with their past job feedback/score. Since freelancers are more likely to be asked to do one-off projects, the quality of delivery will often depend a lot the quality of the brief you provide. We’ve got some tips of on these further below. |
| Forums, social media etc | There are plenty of great Facebook groups, subreddits, question-based websites like Quora that you can post in etc. Because these are free-flowing any advice will be reasonably up to date with industry trends. However it is likely to be general since people are unlikely to have a lot of time replying to an answer for free. You could go the extra step and hire one of the respondents to implement the solution, but this depends a lot on the platform (for instance some Facebook groups allow it, others don’t). |
| Videos, blog posts, books | This knowledge is going to be more comprehensive but usually you would need at least a reasonable amount of background to be able to tailor a solution to your specific case. Sometimes even a great solution in a blog post might need a lot of modification for which you might need to consult one of the other types of people in the list. Plus you need to watch out for recency, a blog post or book about something website-related may get out of date quickly (or not depending on how it’s structured), so you may need to validate the approach with someone first. |
Quick TipBefore seeking external help, make sure to Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo your question. A surprisingly large % of the time, when clients have a question for us that’s how we get to the answer and often it’s in the first few results. No support staff will know all the tricks/technologies so they’ll start with a search too.
Writing a clear brief
A lot of the times the failure of someone to help with your website can be traced back to the original brief. It’s not a guarantee but a clear brief will eliminate confusion, speed up implementation and serve as a fallback in case of disputes. Here’s what we’d recommend for writing a clear brief:
- State the business objectives/outcomes upfront. Many times we get asked to do something and on asking “why”, it turns out that if we did the thing it would not actually achieve the objective. It’s entirely possible for a website owner to know what must be done but to have the wrong idea of how to achieve this, so state both. For example we might be asked to implement an email collection takeover popup on a website. But if the ultimate aim is to get as many people to sign up to a newsletter, the popup might not achieve this (if it’s distracting and annoying enough). If the person helping you knows this they might be able to suggest alternatives. Even if that’s not the type of interaction you’re looking for, it will help you evaluate the project.
- Document what’s going wrong currently. For issues/bugs, state the exact steps that need to be followed to reproduce the bug. Include URLs. Include screenshots. Include a video recording if it’s particularly complex.
- Document what success looks like in detail. If you need to do a mockup or a flow chart, do it! It could save hours of headaches and thousands of dollars or more. You can use a wireframing tool like Moqups but even something like Google Slides is much better than nothing.
Below is an example brief:
| Business objectives | Increase the number of appointment bookings on mysite.com. |
| What’s going wrong currently? |
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| What does success look like? |
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Here’s a placeholder for you to have a go at your own brief.
