Wow, where to start. Project management for websites can be very complicated. Before any company gets into hiring someone to build a website, there should be some kind of outline for the scope of the project. I highly recommmend paying for detailed scope of work outlined so you can shop it around to many web development companies. Otherwise, you’ll get pricing ranging all over the place. If you are hiring a web development firm in USA, expect to pay much higher prices vs using an outsourcing company like Upwork (formerly oDesk), Elance, or Freelancer. Read our blog post How to Outsource and Find Good Contractors for Cheap.
Here at Planet Marketing we try to stay as transparent as possible to gain trust. This is the way we do project management. Maybe you can take our strategy and use it for yourself. Here are some keypoints:
- The website should follow your business objectives
- Choose the right CMS platform like WordPress, Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify, etc. Normally we recommend having more control over the site so WordPress and Magento are almost always good choices.
- Integrate SEO practices while developing. Adding a plugin that’s not SEO friendly can have dire consequences.
If you don’t have a good web developer on staff, pay someone $250 to spec out the project. That’s what we would charge. Following an outline will save a lot more time during web development. Also when the client wants to add a feature in the middle of the project, the web developer can say, “It’s out of the scope. This will be an additional X hours.”
If you have a large project to develope, then you may need some type of agile project management software. If you are developing a WordPress site, then it’s not a complicated process unless you want to customize WordPress. Even developing an Ecommerce site on Magento isn’t complicated unless you’re doing customized work. Trello can work for teh latter two.
What’s probably best to do is have an American web developer do the project management while a team of web developers in India do all the work. And that’s how Planet Marketing has been working for many years. We project manage and we step in whenever the Indian devleopers need some help or more guidance.
In the end, find a web developer who already has experience in the platform your are building your site in. If the person has no Magento ecommerce experience, find someone else. Use that person to project manage. A site that would normally cost $12000 would cost about $3000 – $5000 “if” you have the right people on your team.
