Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a simple piece of advice for organizations embarking on a website project and looking to avoid unpleasant surprises down the road.

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When website projects fail after launch

I was speaking with a group of nonprofit communications professionals recently about managing website projects and a couple of participants described having had similar bad, experiences in the past:

They had both hired an agency, or a solo developer, to build a new website. In both cases, the project had gone well during the build and the launch. The new websites were shiny and exciting, and the projects seemed successful.

However in both cases, a year or two on, things weren’t going so well.

• In one case, the developer had stopped providing support, so the organization was on their own trying to manage security updates for a WordPress website.
• In another case, the agency had created an entirely custom coded website, and after launch, the quality of their maintenance and support deteriorated dramatically. The original point of contact had left the company, and the organization was struggling to get basic support tickets resolved.

In both cases, the organization had approached other website support companies to see if they could cut ties with their original vendors and establish a support relationship with a new vendor.

In both cases, this turned out to be difficult, because when potential new vendors looked under the hood, the websites had been built in a way that would make it very difficult for anyone other than the original developer to maintain.

This, my friends, is what I want you to avoid.

My uncomplicated solution

When these horror stories came up in conversation, one of the participants asked me: “How can we avoid this happening before we start a website project? I don’t know enough about the technology to select developers that won’t leave us high and dry.”

I get this challenge. If you’re writing a website project RFP or talking with potential agencies and developers, you may not know what language to look for or what development approaches to avoid. After all, that’s the whole reason you’re hiring an expert.

This is what I said to the group: You can’t mitigate this risk, but there is one powerful thing you can do.

Check references.

It sounds easy. Obvious. But often this happens at the very end of the vetting process, once decision-makers are already 90% bought-in to a front-runner candidate that made a sparkling presentation.

Checking references is really important.

When you’re considering working with a developer, I recommend asking for a couple of references that:

A) Are for projects built using the same technology and approach they propose using for your project, AND

B) Are for projects completed at least a year ago

And when you talk to these references, ask them what their experience has been maintaining the website and getting support when they needed it, since the project was completed.

You’ll quickly be able to tell whether that developer has continued to provide good support, or whether they tend to lose contact with clients once a project is completed.

If you’re embarking on a website project, I hope this helps you think out a year or two so you can keep getting value from that shiny new website, and have the reassurance of an ongoing, good relationship with your website partner.

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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