The process of developing a website roadmap.
Your website is one of your biggest digital assets so you should have a clearly documented roadmap. The roadmap will allow you to map out enhancements, changes to content, and launches of new products or services. It will help ensure that you are consistently improving one of the main drivers of your business.
Goals
It may seem overly simple, but your website should be simple and intuitive for your customers, so you are going to start with identifying the top three things you want a user to do on your website. From there, we will identify secondary and tertiary actions. By clearly identifying the top conversions you are optimizing for on your website, we will be able to define what type of architecture, content, and tools are needed to support those.
Assessment
The assessment phase is an evaluation of your existing assets and a gap analysis. That includes:
Review of all existing analytics and performance data
Review of system functionalities and performance
Cataloging current content
Competitor analysis
Stakeholder interviews
User data (qualitative and quantitative preferred)
The learnings of the assessment phase are summarized into a document highlighting key learnings and significant gaps for internal buy-in and stakeholder conversations.
Roadmap
Using the key findings and data gathered in the assessment phase, a roadmap is developed that outlines enhancements and changes for:
Architecture
Content (editing, new, personalized, and variable content)
Design elements like content blocks
Content patterns
Tools
Marketing automation
Backend functionalities (SEO, security, speed, etc.)
Analytics
Long term
Like your website, your roadmap should always be evolving, improving and growing. Once you have your roadmap in place, your marketing team should be doing regular website analysis to evaluate performance. Enhancements and changes should be added to the roadmap, which can be used as a communication visual, resource planning document, and prioritization reference.
