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Website project roles and management
One challenge with a website project is that everyone has views about websites – but some views are better informed than others. It’s worth spending time and effort to allocate roles and responsibilities. This will help you avoid common pitfalls like:
- Board members becoming inappropriately engaged with details like colour schemes or navigation structure
- Colleagues adding extra features which can add complexity and cost, without meeting a clear user need
- Lack of clarity about who is delivering what can lead to delays or work not done to the required standard .
Skills and roles
Here are some examples of how you might divide up responsibilities. On a smaller web project, you may be able to combine or drop some of these roles.
The strategic lead for the project, responsible for setting the overall budget and accountable for the quality of the project, and ensuring it is completed on time. For example, you might have a senior staff member giving a high-level report to the board, signalling whether the project is on track or at risk, and any extra actions needed to deliver according to plan.
The project sponsor doesn’t need to know all the detail, but they need to have an up-to-date picture of whether the project is on track or at risk, and extra decisions or actions (eg a change to priorities, budget or capacity) that might be needed.
The project sponsor can also protect a confirmed project brief and plan from meddling from senior people who don’t need to be involved in the detail. They’re accountable for making sure the project works, but they need to carve out space for the project lead and key partners to work to their best ability.
This is your internal team member who is managing the detail of the project. They are thinking about the work in detail on a day-to-day basis, and they are the go-to person for any queries or updates internally and externally. Your outside contacts will use this person to understand the project brief, and your internal contacts will get updates and requests from the project lead. The project lead is responsible for ensuring that the detailed work stays in line with the overall strategy for the website. They will escalate any serious issues or risks to the project sponsor.
This is typically the main developer working on the technical aspects of your site. They will be doing tasks like setting up and configuring your Content Management System, and turning visual assets into page templates. Developers typically specialise in one platform such as Drupal or Wordpress.
You need to spend time and effort making sure your website content is in good shape. Allowing budget for professional design and content strategy will help with this. An expert content strategist or editor will be able to look at your content with a critical eye and make sure that it is well structured and written in a user-friendly way.
Professional design input will help ensure that your website promotes your brand values well and meets accessibility standards. If you’re working on a bigger website project, it’s worth ensuring either that your external partner has this expertise in-house or that you can commission this work separately.
Can I do it by myself or do I need to find outside support?
Websites, like a lot of digital tools can be simple or complex. And with a bit of online research you can often find free tutorials and guides. So you might need to decide between tackling simple steps yourself, or using outside expertise. Here are some principles to help you approach this kind of decision:
- How complex or ambitious is your website project? Simpler sites are easily achievable on a DIY basis, but more complex projects are likely to need to need external support
- Do you (does or someone on your team) have the interest and willingness to spend some time learning new skills?
- Does that person have spare time capacity to dedicate to learning the skills and testing them out?
- Would learning as you do the work yourself give you a skillset you can use later on to help maintain the site?
- If you’re answering yes to most of these statements, a DIY approach could work for you. Otherwise, it might make more sense to use an external partner to save you time and trouble. Also, connecting with an external partner could give you a resource and expertise you could draw on in future.
Website project outline template
We're providing a template with ideas of the different information you might choose to include in a website build project brief. This will help if you're working with someone external, or as an internal project description.
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