How can large organizations benefit from standardizing website-related processes?

Having a straightforward process for creating an effective website for a small business is reasonably clear. But for the large organizations with numerous units and globally spread presence, it is a challenge only to establish a process. 

Large organizations and corporations usually deal with numerous websites and platforms. And requests for new websites or platforms are just piling up. Growing demand for web development usually results in a variety of different ways and approaches in one organization. And if there is no established procedure or governance around web development, it leads to various cost, resource, and communication effectiveness issues. Internal silos, structure, and external influences easily jeopardize the desired quality. So the question is how to respond to the growing demand efficiently and needed website quality simultaneously?

Easy to ask but requires a bit more effort to choose the most efficient and effective path. After the idea to create the website, we should spend some time creating a solid plan. Streamlined planning may help us to be more efficient during website development. The usual challenge and trap shift from customers or visitors to internal politics. Departments think they should have a presence on the web to prove their importance, and therefore the risk of dropping customers from the priority stakeholder risk is higher. 

The process often has many back and forward with web developers and web designers. It is an iterative journey that always has new beginnings. Activities like, let's try this or that template or social media widget. So many of them! Then let's explore new email or different marketing platform integration, or let's try this top navigation structure or menu. All this can increase development time significantly. It is challenging to streamline website development work and focus more on effective website communications. Isn't that the main reason we built the websites?

However, a quality website where visitors will engage with content must be the primary goal. Every organization should find an equilibrium between two related processes, cost-efficient website development and effective communications with added value to visitors. And there is a business need to standardize both processes, development, and content publishing. 

Using effective and standardized planning can help. Owners and developers usually have their approach, from those who keep everything in their heads to those who jump into content management systems and start building structure and pages using ad-hoc templates and methods. Standardizing any process makes things efficient while maintaining the required quality. 

Let's take social media as an example. Both Facebook and Twitter have relatively easy-to-use content management systems where users can publish desired content in a few seconds. Both platforms standardize the content publishing processes to enable easy use and administration. To create a post, users must comply with predefined profile image size, video file size, amount of text in specific fields, etc. Twitter was well-known with its 140 characters limit. And several billion users are pretty happy focusing more on communications and engagement rather than arguing whether it is better to have a ten or 50 words long title. Many editors become creative when faced with space limitations and use that to their advantage. Social media users get information fast, when, how, and where they want. Besides their social connectivity benefits and easy-to-use interfaces, the main reason for their global success is managing to standardize communications across the globe. That is an astonishing achievement considering all different cultures, languages, and demographics. Therefore social networks have a superpower - standards.

Just wondering what Twitter could look like if users can enter more than 1000 chars in a single tweet or users are allowed to upload a video file of any size?

What are website standards, and from where are they?

Every digital platform needs some requirements and content publishing standards. Those enable easier platform management and consistent user experience. I prefer the definition that I found in Ms. Lisa Welchman's book "Managing the Chaos - Digital Governance by design":

Digital standards enable the organization to put into place details for execution to perform digital work consistently and effectively.

We could quickly implement this definition, focusing only on websites. Website standards are as old as the Internet technology itself. Here is an exciting story about standards for the browser applications we all use to explore the worldwide web.

During the web browser wars 1995-2000, between Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator, a few prominent web developers, and designers established "The Web Standards Project" - (WaSP). The reason was that both companies and their browser applications extended their HTML interpretations to the point of collapse. Two browsers continuously introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web pages which escalated to where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible. Practically speaking, the same website could provide a different user experience depending on what browser visitors use. And like in any superhero movie, the WaSP is the avenger. The WaSP's primary goal was getting browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The (end)war was over in 2001, and the WaSP community won. WaSP's superpowers are standards with impact.

Do large organizations need a superpower of website standards?

Back in 1998, when I coordinated and created the first corporate website for a considerably large client, the process was undefined. I remember many meetings and (mostly) political decisions about what needs to be available on the front page and in what order. However, it is a private sector, so we did what our client wanted us to do. After a few more clients and websites, we notice repeating patterns we usually follow without even noticing. For most of our clients, we have to make decisions about the logo position, navigation elements, wireframe (we called them web schemas at the time), must-have content, image standards, etc. When we receive a CD with over 500 photographs in various formats and file sizes, we have to implement some standards for publishing without jeopardizing the quality. And to finish the job in time.

Standardizing web development work helped us a lot to improve our productivity and quality over time. Also, we noticed it was very beneficial to decide about design and navigation elements even before the actual web development started. A sheet of paper with a wireframe doesn't complain as a developer could when we want to change the order or structure of elements before the website launch. Despite differences between the private sector, marketing agencies, and large organizations, they both have one similarity: demand for websites. 

Based on best practices and the above real-life examples, Creately developed the Website Planning Template and Guidance as a first step to help those who decide to create a website and engage with digital audiences.

The purpose of the Website Planning Template is to: 

• Standardize the planning process of all corporate websites;
• Align developers and owners around terminology and project goals;
• Maintaining the quality of every website; and
• Ensure future website standards compliance.

If you are among those facing brand inconsistency, including less productive and standardized development work, this is what you need. When the planning process is standardized, the next step is much easier. Thank you, Creately.