Website Project Plan
This Website Project Plan is a complete managerial guide to ensure all major phases are included. Examples are mentioned to show real world applied project management principles. This is a part of my WordPress Website Plan category.
Requirements Gathering
All project plans include requirements gathering, especially for site planning. The following show key areas to ensure inclusion. Also, if this is a rebuild website project plan, look over my post “Rebuild Website Guide“. That post is only for the building aspect but gives you a solid list for ensuring inclusion of many items.
Ownership and Authorization
Identify the owners and sole authority figures supporting this project. While there might be several, you should be provided a minimal set of people. Also, they should be empowered to individually provide quick approvals and immediate authorizations for all phases. Finally, sometimes there are different owners designated for different project phases.
Website Mission Goals Defined
Defining high level website mission goals is the root basis in such an endeavor. This is a list of basic and summarized goals to follow. The purpose is also to deter excessive tasks or costs that might be considered unnecessary or superficial.
Available Resources
Next, with mission goals defined, you’ll need to check if available resources are enough to fulfill the mission. This requires a good deal of expertise in several areas so reviewing available resources often involves several people. Also, you’ll want to ensure you prepared to have the resources need that match your website requirements.
Your website project plan’s resource areas are things like:
- Assets overall
- Hosting & Networking aspects
- Domain control
- Licensing
- Security
- Budgeting Costs
- Time Resources
- Legal aspects
Assets Overall
It’s important to ensure you have needed assets overall for completing defined goals. Next are discussed these areas.
Hosting & Networking
Hosting and networking decisions often involve a complex series of tradeoffs. Also, if you’re picking out a new domain name, getting it from your chosen site host makes setup much easier. So, know what host provider is to be designated to serve the website. This requires specialized expertise to ensure anticipated site needs will be satisfied. Also, it’s important to ensure all known or anticipated tools will work on the chosen hosting platform.
The site’s networking is important for many factors. For example, the site server’s port speed for uploads and downloads can impact offsite backups and CDN updates. Other aspects studied are things like RAID, uptime, shared vs VPS vs dedicated, CPU core types, Memory version, Drive storage types, and a lot more.
Finally, the geographic location of hosting can dictate its country’s governmental requirements to think about. Also, the use of which brand of CDN to use worldwide can dictate varied performances, locations count, and reliability.
Domain Control
Familiarize yourself with the designated domain’s set of contacts such as administrative, technical, etc. Also, know who the domain’s registrar is and DNS names. If you’re relatively new to domain management, it’s much easier if you get the domain name directly from the site host. You can move it later as you gain experience.
Licensing
Licensing for all services, apps, and tools used is important to identify. Some will need to be listed in the budget costing as recurring or one-time costs. Also, don’t forget to show the licensing limitations such as max concurrent sessions allowed, bandwidth limits, user limits, and so on.
Security
Security will involve at least site security but also might involve physical security such as for buildings, rooms, or server accessibility. Security is a specialty area but sometimes this can be handled more easily by including a host server security addon. Also, there are tons of security plugins but these sometimes can impact performance.
See my “Complete Guide to Security of WordPress Sites” and “WP Security Check” for more detailed guidance.
Budgeting Costs
Create a list of known and potential costs. These are openly shared with the team so added input is encouraged for missed items or to define excessive costs. For example, having unnecessary hosting features for high performance might not be needed for anticipated lower traffic sites.
Time Resources
Time resources can involve literal calendar timelines but also can include labor costs and time management to contain labor costs. Project timelines should be routinely created and posted so everyone’s on the same page for things like progress anticipations and demands.
Also, overlaying separated tasking timelines can help to ensure timely coordination of certain task completions. Good timelines can help to manage dependent tasks so progress overall continues unimpeded.
Legal Aspects
It’s important to follow appropriate legal aspects of any website planning. Decisions should be made about what legal pages to have in place with a minimum of a general privacy policy page. Others to consider are numerous such as Terms of Use, DMCA, GDPR, EU Privacy Policy, Cookie Privacy Policy, CCPA, and others.
Website Development Project Plan
The website development project plan is focused on defining its structure and design before building it.
- Initially, you confirm the site system, like using WordPress. This, of course, has to coincide with whatever type of server operating system you’ll be choosing.
- Initially, knowing the mission goals and focus, you’ll want to list the pages, posts, categories, and tags anticipated. Formal naming each comes later. This often will coincide with and be updated during some of the other planning phases.
- Then, for infrastructure, you’ll want to define menus and site navigation for header, footer, and mobile for both. See my post “Navigation Pages for Header and Footer“.
- You’ll typically define what theme to use during this web development project planning phase.
- With the above known items, you can then decide what plugins or other addons to consider. Commonly, this will involve theme addons and possibly block addons also. Read my post “My WP Plugin List” for more active and current decision making on this topic.
- It’s important to define color schemes, logo, site icon, banner (optional), fonts, and any other considerations for design properties.
- Another area is to define layouts and any custom templates for pages, posts, and archives. Archives like categories and tags, might open up the desire to include time for custom templates. Sometimes, however, this is reserved for later development as the site develops post project.
- Regarding development versus building, it is very acceptable to allow the build team to test out or practice certain planning decisions. This is extremely important for using applied management practices. This is strongly urged to have allowed because it will provide the following results.
- This practice of permitting designers to experiment or try out tasks ensures functions can actually occur and with desired results.
- It will reduce the amount of issues during the build phase.
- It can reveal discoveries if additional tools or licenses might be needed.
- This can provide better time estimates to put into project timelines later.
- Revealing any inconsistencies or accessibility metrics errors on chosen properties like colors, fonts, etc.
- The longest portion of this development phase is to list the starting pages and posts, along with their drafted content as suggested here.
- List all starting pages and posts. See my post on “How Many Pages Should a Website Have?“.
- Write draft content for only starting pages and posts. This will involve KW research and initial images and also possibly other media.
- Write descriptive content for categories and tags. A category can be planned to be indexed if 3-5 posts are assigned to it.
- When writing posts or pages, consider employing a WordPress POST Roadmap Checklist.
Project Timeline for Website Development
Create a project timeline for website development, since the above listing is time intensive. Also, allow for extra time for research of items and disagreements among team members or owners discovered preferences. This is also the time where key focus topics (like categories) shift a bit and sometimes are redefined.
Website Build Project Plan
The Website Build Project Plan is a set of phases that directly involve site construction. It’s executed when the development plan is finished and signed off by the owner(s).
It’s already had some items tested or practiced during the development planning stages. The more successful projects will have focused most of its time in the previous development stages so the building aspect can occur with little interruption.
Website Creation Project Plan
The website creation project plan involves producing the website over a period of time. Sometimes, it’s done in a site staging environment. In other cases, it’s done on a live site but tagged to discourage search engines due to non-indexing the entire site. There are tons of other options. Regardless, this phase begins usually with its own project timeline.
Project Timeline for Website Build
The project timeline for website build is often far shorter than the development phases. That’s because the startup content has already been written, keywords researched, images ready, theme colors and fonts decided, and so on. However, it’s still time intensive so the timeline is required and, leads up to a “Go Live” anticipated date.
The website designer will work on applying all the site and theme settings. However, there are a lot of plugins requiring settings also. So, time should be allowed for compensating past the content portions.
Also, consider time to allow for any DNS or CDN changes to take place.
Website Maintenance
Considerations of website maintenance are important when developing, building, and editing take place. For starters, for lesser experienced teams or individuals, it’s best to include the addon service of “Site Management” to the host providers site plan.
Other aspects of website maintenance involve ensuring a good backups schedule is setup and validated working. This will involve added storage so, having a good, responsive cloud storage for backups also gives you an offsite recovery system, which is good for security.
Another consideration is to be prepared for rollbacks when issues are experienced after an update like a plugin version change.
Project Management
Regarding Website Project Management, there are many common principles to follow. These time-tested practices will reduce chaos when undesired events occur. Also, these practices will cut down on issues to start with.
Here are five top website project planning tools along with their Home URLs:
- Trello
- URL: https://trello.com
- Asana
- URL: https://asana.com
- Monday.com
- URL: https://monday.com
- Jira
- ClickUp
- URL: https://clickup.com
Website Changes
Website changes are going to occur somewhat frequently, even post project ending. So, having procedures in place for all kinds of site changes is a good idea. Create your own checklists based on what things might alter over time. Some examples are replacing images, changing slugs, adding or deleting a tag, and so on.
Website Change Requests
Website change requests will occur often during the website development project planning and building. So, it’s very important to define procedures for different types of change requests. Some might require an owner to sign off. Also, some might add a one-time added labor cost and others might cause a new recurring cost to the budget.
With an agreed change request plan in place, everyone becomes aware beforehand, what added costs might be incurred upon approval of changes.
- Formstack Change Request Templates (paid, after free trial)
- JotForm (free & paid all kinds of templates; free gives 5 per month)
- Change Request Form (customize it online)
Procedures for Issues
There are a few common issues that can be spelled out in advance so everyone’s aware ahead of time. Examples are site slowness or being down, performance reductions, CDN down, and upgrade issues or bugs.
Common handling of many issues should be known and agreed to with full authority to act without needing prior permissions. That’s also helpful to have in place if issues happen after hours. Also, it’s important to have this in place for discovered security issues.
Procedures for New Discoveries
New Discoveries are both good and bad as they occur. The idea is that a “Discovery” is something that happened and it wasn’t known beforehand. So, it’s best to mention that unknown occurrences can happen and that added costs or unplanned disruptions can occur. An example might be that an upgrade to a plugin now interferes with minification of a particular JavaScript that now causes a drop in performance metrics worldwide.
Costs for processing new discoveries might involve research to debug and search for a cause of an unplanned event. Also, further costs might include attempting a resolution and that it’s not guaranteed.
Content Procedures
It best to have content procedures as part of any project plan for website development. Such procedures often involve a checklist. Checklists can cover creating, editing, or deleting an item such as a post, page, category, tag, heading, footer, any URL, and a few others.
Website Project Reviews
In creating a website project plan, it imperative to have planned project reviews. This validates progress is taking place and opens the door for redirection or change considerations. It also encourages openly shared communications with all key players. Finally, this is where a lot of questions and answers can take place, along with any necessary authorizations or approvals.
Finally, after such project reviews, timelines are often updated to reflect adjusted decisions made.
Post Project Phase
This is the number one neglected phase for all projects. Usually, after a project end, everyone’s relieved, and closure is automatic. However, allow some time in the project for a final quality assurance check.
QA or QC is for verifying some important things are actually taking place. For example, confirm the CDN and caching are still permitting site functions to work. Also, it might be discovered that something doesn’t visually look appealing in Apple’s Safari browser on mobile. Another example might be that the shopping cart doesn’t empty after a purchase is made, even though it worked in testing.
Project Completion Validation & Signoff
While project reviews had an ongoing validation, you’ll want a project completion and signoff for final closure. This occurs actually after the post project phase. Also, it’s actually a good practice to have periodic signoffs for a long list of tasks as they are performed for the entire project duration.
Reconfirm Ongoing Website Processes
Lastly, it’s a good idea to reconfirm that several operational tasks will take place at the end of the project. Just confirm that recurring operations will take place as the norm. Examples of recurring operations are: Site Monitoring & Maintenance, SEO actions and updates, Change Request Procedures, and well defined Preapproved Change Procedures.
Conclusion
Now you’ve seen an entire website project plan with some real world examples referenced. It showed the distinct separation of the development phase from the build phase. Some will have 2 separated plans for those. Moving forward, now you can use this guide to review your website development project plan and your website build project plan for any missing components.
Jeff Baygents Certifications: “Security +” and “Project +”