Website Project Management: Expert Guide to Web Builds

Over 40% of projects fail to meet one of three success criteria: completed on time, on budget, or on target (2015 Chaos Report). So, before you start building your website, go back to the basics and consider the crucial steps of successful website planning.

Website project management is the process of planning, building, and monitoring a website. It includes a diverse development team of designers, developers, and QA engineers, as well as a project manager to oversee the progress.

As managing a web project requires smooth cooperation between several departments and disciplines, not to mention close collaboration with the client, efficient project management is essential for unifying and standardizing your workflows. One of the key steps in conducting website project management is choosing a methodology and project management software.

In this guide, we’ll take you through all of the main stages of website project management, with useful statistics and tips and tricks that can help you keep complex projects on track. Let’s start with the beginning: how does a typical web project life cycle look?

Website project management can be separated into four main steps spanning different periods of the web development life cycle: project planning, website design and development, testing, website maintenance, and website security. In the following section, we’ll explore the crucial concerns of each phase of web end to end management and provide examples of good practices that can help you form your own strategy for client projects.

The main goal of the planning and discovery phase is to establish the needs of the client by identifying the project goals and outcomes. This phase is also sometimes known as the “scoping” phase. During this time, the project manager and client will put together the terms of the project, during one or multiple interviews, including the answers to the following questions:

The design and development phase is the most crucial one for website project development workstreams: this is when your development team will start bringing the project plan to fruition, i.e. begin the website building process. Although this step can be rather specific depending on your project type, here are some important concepts that can be applied when overseeing and managing development project execution:

Check out our article on the best graphic design project management software to learn more.

Testing is usually carried out by developers during coding and by QA testers throughout various phases of the project execution, depending on your project methodology. The pre-launch period might also include end-user testing, conducted by releasing the product to segments of the audience (beta release) or releasing two versions side by side to compare them (A/B testing). In order to deliver a product that’s as polished as possible, creating a testing checklist that organizes tester feedback into critical and non-critical bugs is essential:

Check out testing tips from Productive’s VP of Engineering.

Another significant thing to keep in mind is the distinction between bugs and change requests. While bugs denote that something from the original design has a faulty or incomplete implementation, change requests concern adding new requirements or details to originally conceptualized features. Change requests might be addressed after the launch of a project, in agreement with the client and the original project plan, but it’s best for developers to focus on polishing the project as late as the testing and deployment phase.

If a significant change to functionalities must be implemented, approach it with the utmost care, as it might interact unexpectedly with other elements and impact your project deadlines.

Here are some typical tasks tackled in the late phases of development:

The extent of maintenance and support offered after the website launch will differ depending on the agreed-upon terms in the pitching and planning process. Strictly speaking, maintenance doesn’t include the development of additional features, but rather various optimizations that build upon existing features, but this can also vary from project to project.

Some examples of services offered during the maintenance and support period are:

Try to integrate a maintenance and support period as part of your design project management workflow, even if it requires raising the cost of your services. Maintenance normally amounts to up to 90% of the total cost of ownership of a software product (PMC), meaning that you’ll be missing out on significant profits if you neglect to do so.

Keep in mind that this is a win-win for both you and the client: the client gets a more stable, cost-effective product that is functioning as intended, with the added benefit of working with a trusted agency that can provide this service at maximum efficiency. You, the agency, can get either an additional period of funding at a fixed price or even a retainer.

Source: Why Web Application Maintenance Should Be More of a Thing

However, make sure to set boundaries for what maintenance consists of and how many hours per month you’ll be billing – otherwise, you might find yourself doing a lot more than you signed up for.

According to research by PwC, 77% of all high-performing projects are managed with the help of a project management platform. Despite that, the same survey shows that as much as 44% of project managers do not believe in using software to manage projects. Yet, their agency probably uses some online tools for organizing their workflows, whether it’s Excel, Google Docs, or some type of internal solution.

This is a suboptimal way of keeping your projects on track. Even though it might work for simpler projects or smaller teams, your agency will start outscaling rudimentary methods quickly:

In the next section, we’ll explore some key elements of successful project execution by providing insightful statistics and first-hand user testimonials. Keep reading to find out how you can improve your project management skills by using the right creative workflow tools.

Data shows that most project managers don’t have the luxury of focusing on a single project but rather manage multiple projects, with 59% running between 2 and 5 projects and even 15% running more than 10 at a time (RGPM).

With such busy, complex workflows, working blind is a recipe for disaster.

Project managers need to be in sync with their digital agency’s resources: which skillsets are covered by which seniority levels, how much are teams or particular members being utilized, and what is their cost per service?

All of these answers can be covered by creating an efficient resourcing plan. Project management tools with a capacity planning feature, such as Productive, can support high-level resource management with comprehensive overviews that consider the full picture of your agency resources. Productive also integrates leave management, so you can get an accurate overview of your actual resource availability:

Agencies with complex workflows and large teams can benefit from grouping their resources by various filters, including skills, teams, and departments, as well as filtering views by a desired parameter (project, client, etc.) to ensure a more effective planning process.

If you want to learn more about the features and benefits of these tools, check these top tools for capacity planning examples.

According to research, 43% of agencies mostly or always complete their projects on budget, while only 29% mostly or always complete projects on time (Wellingtone). This statistic is unsurprising to anyone with experience in any type of project management, as a variety of difficulties or roadblocks will likely arise during the process, no matter how well your project was initially planned out.

However, what’s important is the distinction between accepting this based on planned outcomes and client feedback, and having to accept it because it caught you fully unaware:

There are two main features of effective design project management software that can help you gain full project visibility: time tracking and financial forecasting.

The first is time management in the form of integrated time tracking. Whether you’re running a fixed-priced, hourly, or hybrid type of project, agency time tracking software is essential to gaining key insights into the cost of your services, your real agency utilization, and ultimately your profitability.

Learn more about the agency utilization rate.

If you don’t have time tracking implemented into your workflows yet, you might find some resistance to this change. For creative project management, this issue might become even more exacerbated, as creatives like designers and illustrators could feel like their creativity is being unfairly quantified or micromanaged. In order to make the process of switching to time tracking easier for everyone, make sure to invest in a tool that streamlines the task and makes it as non-intrusive as possible.

For example, Productive provides multiple ways of creating time entries to accommodate various preferred ways of working, including real-time tracking from tasks, manual entry, as well as automatic pulling of booked time from your project resourcing plan. This ensures that teams have a hassle-free way of handling their time entries, while managers get the data they need to manage project timelines and project schedules.

The SoDa Report on the Global Agency Landscape in 2022 provides interesting insights into how extensively agencies manage their financial data: in fact, more than half of participating agencies – including digital agencies (41%), integrated agencies (14%), brand creative agencies (11%), digital product studios (8%), and others – don’t use integrated project management platforms that provide in-depth, real-time data of their business health. Additionally, very few keep track of key agency metrics that can significantly impact growth and client project success.

What does this mean for you? Well, you can get ahead of the competition by investing in a project management tool that enables you to see just that. Take for example Productive’s Budgeting feature: You can build budgets of any type and get invaluable data that fuel project execution and post-completion insights, as well as streamline day-to-day operations. Additionally, with Productive’s financial forecasting capabilities, you’ll be able to resolve project roadblocks before they even occur.

With Productive, you can manage your agency’s health by:

For more insights into optimizing your financial management, check out the webinar below:

Last, but definitely not least, we come to the importance of establishing effective team collaboration and communication with all external stakeholders. According to a survey by PMI, the primary cause of failure of strategic initiatives was a lack of clearly defined objectives and milestones to measure progress (37%). As crucial as it is for management roles to fully understand and stay on track with project goals, what many project teams get incorrectly is just how important it is for everyone involved to do the same:

Source: Excerpt from How to Make Things Happen

Transparency and clear workflows are most easily achieved by project management software that can provide visualizations of progress through various project views. For example, Productive lets you manage your tasks with list view, board view, calendar view, and more.

What’s so great about a space like this is that all team members can get visibility into a project’s larger picture; depending on how you’re setting up your projects, they can switch through each department’s tasks by switching to different boards, or focus on how their own team is progressing.

By keeping task communication and updates on the platform, you can also easily keep everyone updated with all essential information – for example, if a designer from another project needs to step in, they can quickly check the task requirements, what has been done, who was doing it, when it’s supposed to be done, and what the associated dependencies are, all from viewing a single task screen.

This extends beyond the internal project team. By setting up projects with management software, you can easily invite your clients to view your progress and share updates and feedback without infinite back and forth via email. Depending on how you set up permission rights, clients can also get a direct overview of their budgets or employee time sheets. Productive can become the single source of truth for all your essential project data and agency insights, drastically simplifying decision-making, team collaboration, and client relationships.

Additionally, don’t forget about the importance of a post-mortem review. It’s one of the most valuable tools for fostering organizational know-how and improving transparency between project team members. A successful project retrospective will provide actionable strategies for improved project delivery.

Project documentation is any kind of written material that details steps taken throughout a project’s lifestyle. An example of documentation on a website management project would be the initial project proposal, as well as design and technical documentation. The latter kind contains guidelines for how to maintain website design and make updates and changes, for example, API documentation. Documentation is best managed online, where multiple people can work together and changes are updated in real-time. Certain collaboration tools such as Productive offer their own platforms for sharing and maintaining project documentation.

Best practices related to maintaining project documentation can be heavily dependent on project, methodology, and client-related factors. Still, A general rule of thumb is to be proactive rather than reactive, and maintain documentation throughout the project lifecycle, rather than putting it off until the later project stages. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where a client is asking for a multi-page document that you haven’t even started.

Here are some additional tips from one of Productive’s Frontend Engineers for how to turn documenting from a chore into a habit:

To find some specialized tools for your needs, check out our list of the top engineering project management software.

One of the key skills required to ensure effective project management is knowing which methodology will bring out the strengths of your team and fulfill your client’s needs and project requirements. In the following section, we’ll help you master your web agency project management with a list of the main project management methodologies. Check out a summary of their benefits and downsides, with advice on when to implement which web project management method.

Waterfall is a project management methodology traditionally used in construction and manufacturing, both industries that have clear phases with a well-defined product output. It’s characterized by comprehensive project planning and documentation that is used to create a linear, sequential project execution. In Waterfall methodology, project goals are not expected to change, and delivery comes at the end of the development process.

Nowadays, Waterfall methodology is somewhat less likely to be utilized than agile for software development, as data shows higher success rates for agile: projects conducted with agile have a 64% success rate to waterfall’s 49% success rate (Ambysoft). This, of course, doesn’t mean that Waterfall doesn’t have its own benefits.

The benefits: Project workflows handled through Waterfall methodology are more easily documented and replicated, streamlining future project initiation and planning. As they are more rigid, timelines and budgets are also set more clearly, which can be a benefit during the pitching and execution stage. Progress is more easily ascertained in waterfall projects, as it revolves around clearly delineated phases that follow one after another, which can also contribute to better client-agency transparency.

The downsides: Since project plans are seen as set in stone, backtracking is much more challenging and can result in significant delays. Paradoxically, Waterfall methodologies might also result in more need for revision as compared to agile team workflows, since QA is usually slated at the end of development. Ultimately, if the planning phase wasn’t conducted clearly enough, the end product has a higher risk of not turning out how the client imagined with linear, structured processes such as Waterfall.

When to consider using Waterfall: The Waterfall methodology can be used to great success for projects with clearly defined requirements, and clients that would prefer to take a hands-off approach to development. This could potentially be used for clients and agencies with a history of working with each other, that have established processes based on previous project performance and a degree of trust between the involved parties.

Agile project management is the principle of breaking down projects into smaller constituents, called sprints. Each sprint will contain a series of tasks that need to be completed and that form potentially shippable websites, usually followed by testing, client feedback, and iteration. Agile is frequently used in software development, though it can be applied to a range of projects, including marketing and design (we also have a guide on project management in marketing that you can check out).

In fact, 71% of organizations report that they sometimes, often, or always use agile approaches for their projects (PMI).

The main tenets of Agile according to the original Agile Manifesto are:

The benefits: When you simplify a project into smaller chunks, team members get the benefit of focusing on smaller tasks, which can result in greater productivity and efficiency. Agile also allows for flexibility and adaptivity in the process, as each sprint can be seen as a singular constituent that can be adjusted to fit the whole. This results in improved client relationships, and can help teams deliver high-quality projects that can accurately answer client needs.

The downsides: Agile project management is generally unsuitable for traditional organizations that rely on rigid processes or operating methods. Additionally, flexibility and reliance on client communication can be a double-edged sword, as sprints can balloon out of proportion without proper restraint. Even more so than on traditional projects, project managers need to be very in sync with their project resources to be able to take advantage of the flexibility and responsiveness of their agile teams.

When to consider using Agile: Consider Agile for complex projects that are difficult to fully map out in the initial project planning phase. Agile can help evolve the project step-by-step, with frequent feedback from the client – rather than spending hours on the planning phase, issues can addressed on the fly to ensure client satisfaction.

Scrum is a framework that helps teams apply the tenets of the agile methodology. It’s most suitable for development companies with smaller teams that can work dynamically. These teams usually include a scrum master and a product owner to oversee and manage progress. Some key values of Scrum project planning are self-management, transparency, adaptation, and inspection.

The scrum framework consists of the following main components:

Kanban is another framework within the agile methodology, used to help support project progress by providing visualizations through a Kanban board. The key principle of Kanban is continuous flow: tasks are pulled from the project backlog and are moved across the board, signifying the stages of its completion.

The Kanban framework consists of the following main components:

Now that we’ve gone through the basics of each project methodology, and how you might best utilize them for your client-based project, it’s important to highlight that these methodologies are just that: tools you use to make your projects easier to manage and more successful. Don’t feel too constrained by rules or what’s recommended on paper – do what’s best for your particular client project and needs, in the context of overall creative agency operations.

In fact, certain surveys show that more than half of project managers use hybrid approaches, most frequently a blend of waterfall and agile methods (RGPM). A common example of a hybrid approach would be using Waterfall for the project planning phase, i.e. creating a more structured plan, but executing it with Agile to get the necessary flexibility and adaptivity.

Another interesting statistic is that 81% of agile teams use some version of Scrum, which includes hybrid models such as Scrumban (Digital.ai). Although Scrumban is usually used to transition from one methodology to the other, it can also be used regularly – frequently by combining a Kanban space with two-week project sprints. There are, of course, other ways that these two philosophies can be merged in practice. As we’ve established, the world is your oyster.

Try experimenting and seeing what works best for your team. And if you feel stuck, going back to the basics and reminding yourself why these methodologies were created in the first place is a great way to contextualize your processes, and ultimately gain a deeper understanding of what successful project management is.

For more tips on how to efficiently deliver projects, check out the video below:

Finally, after going through all of the critical steps of the web design project management process, here are our final tips for delivering a successful client website project. Keep in mind that the final result is just one part of the battle. Maintaining a healthy project life cycle is key to ensuring satisfaction for your project team and your client, and for driving long-term improvement for future agency ventures.

One of the key factors for a project’s success is making sure that everyone is aligned on its goals and objectives. This can help your internal team focus and execute project milestones more effectively, but it can also help prevent any misunderstandings with the client that could possibly derail the project. A good way to achieve this is to periodically address the larger picture in sync meetings, as well as manage an open project space where everyone can keep track of updates.

This tip is more mindset-oriented: as a project manager, don’t get bent out of shape when something doesn’t go according to plan. In the dynamic world of web project management, this is more likely than the opposite. So, if you can’t stop change from happening, take steps towards being prepared for it. Having a reactive tool in place that can help you reschedule your resources and check the impact of change on the entire project can go a long way.

Following up on the above, try to think out of the box when dealing with unexpected or unforeseen situations. For example, if a task isn’t progressing according to plan for whatever reason, take a step back and try to fit it into the larger picture. Maybe it doesn’t impact the overall result as much as you might initially think. Additionally, make sure to embrace feedback and be open to adjusting your strategies. Continuous testing and iteration are a great way to deliver a polished product.

Don’t forget to empower your team by celebrating when things are going well. Although it’s a common practice to hold a project review after sign-off, make sure to leave some time to acknowledge the small victories along the way. Fostering a positive work environment is a very significant factor in delivering a polished end result and fulfilling client needs.

Finally, all of this will be much easier to achieve if you support your processes with comprehensive creative agency project management software. From ensuring more transparency, to providing you with real-time insight into financial health and streamlining administrative tasks, these tools can turn a headache into a walk in the park. Before investing in a tool, make sure to do your research and find a solution that fits your agency and project needs.

If you’re looking for an all-in-agency management solution for agencies that can support the entire project management process, book a demo with Productive today.