Jasmine Web Starter

A website should not be a make and forget task in your business, your website needs to move forward as your business grows and moves forward. Customers today don't like out of date information, and with so much choice at their fingertips its easy for them to choose spending their money elsewhere.

But even if you have a full time website person or a team full of them, a business website plan can sometimes be over looked. Which sometimes means only one area of the website gets all the time focused on it, and other less glam tasks keep getting overlooked dragging the website down overall.

When planning for website updates, rewrites or new sections, it can sometimes be useful to take a step back and look at what business tasks you have defined per quarter. Then with that in mind you can try to break down the steps into a monthly website plan, along with any outstanding work not yet published.

Maybe you have also benchmarked your site with something like Google Lighthouse and found issues along the way, such as contrast colours or image issues, these could also be factored into the monthly plan to be fixed.

But in any business you are always going to have "planned" and "unplanned" work that needs to be completed along the way. How you are able to react and adapt is important to keep publishing each month.

What do you mean by Unplanned work

I define "Unplanned work" as tasks defined by some one else. Maybe you are using a Service/CMS/Shopping Cart and a new feature turns up that makes sense to your business, or you receive an email that something is shutting down on some random date.

Think & plan ahead

It can be useful to think along the lines of minor / major tasks when defining your website plan too.

These could be to replace an old addin with modern CSS options, or maybe to rollout newer HTML / CSS options that might make updating easier in the long term. Website speed is a major factor today and also a search engine ranking factor. So cutting down your images size or the number of addin files that a page or site is using, might be a priority early on in the plan.

Its great for your customers if you can keep your website fresh and up to date, but constantly updating content in some circumstances can be difficult for frontline staff members to keep abreast of. So its also really useful within a business to know when and what might be happening and to keep everyone necessary in the loop.

If its someone's job within the company to take care of the website, this is so much easier to manage. But if you are buying someone's time, then a clear plan might cut down the costs long term, and allow you to split content updates against web development tasks each quarter.

So I would recommend that your monthly plan defines

• User experience
• Content updates and freshness
• Technical performance
• Web development update (say new CSS/HTML options or JavaScript updates or clean up what's maybe not in use any more)
• Security
• New sections/services
• How you measure the website (traffic, users or benchmarking like Lighthouse)

Keep ahead of the curve

Its important to remember that browsers get updated in most cases each month. So if you can react quickly to new features that are available you might be able to offer updates and new website features ahead of your competitors.

But at the end of the day you want to make sure that its easy to publish to your website and that you can do so regularly.

Planning for the unknown

Now this may sound like an impossible task but we have covered some of the more common issues that can crop up in our Planning for unplanned tasks article.