Vitaly Kolesnik has written a very interesting article on the perception of the key elements of a web project and their relationships.

I took the liberty of summing up the main ideas of his article as well as the critique of his approach.

Website Project

Compared to the traditional media, websites’ potential for evolving is bigger. A fresh made website is more like a DNA for a future creature rather than a ready-to-use product.

Very often there is a strong desire to create a website, but the perception of the desired result is rather vague. There is a need to get a picture of the website’s course of evolvement. There is a need to understand the relationship between parts of the project. There is a need to balance these parts out and align their development to the general course.

Elements Diagram

The following approach helps to illustrate the website’s development and is very useful in the interaction with the customer.

The project is broken into three pairs of parameters. Following the discussion with the customer, each of the six parameters gets 1 to 10 points of importance. These points are mapped on the diagram and the resulting figure shows the current perception of the project.

The black figure demonstrates a skew for the website’s outlook and misses other important features. This might eventually lead to the project failure, since content, audience and sales channels are neglected.

The green figure has all the elements properly balanced.

1^st Pair:

What to sell? – When assessing this element, you evaluate company’s competitive advantages and quality of goods and services. Quite often people tend to overestimate these features. It helps to picture an ideal company with ideal goods and services, assign it 10 points, and then compare it to the company being assessed.

How to sell? – Evaluate how much resources will be allocated to the promotion and development of the website. If ‘What’ is quite small, there is no need to allocate too much resources to ‘How’ – you might get a negative ROI. This is quite obvious. However some fail to see that the same is true in the inverse direction as well. Often the resources allocated to the online promotion of a top-class good or service are inadequate.

2^nd Pair:

Company – How will the website influence the company? What is the value of the website for the company?

Audience – What is the website’s value for the target audience?

If the website is created for the sole reason such as ‘everyone else has one’ – it would have a little value for the company. You shouldn’t expect such a website to attract a considerable audience. On the contrary, if a website is of a great value for the target audience, it will achieve a great exposure and become a valuable asset for the company as well.

3^rd Pair:

Outlook and Content.

An attractive outlook has a great positive influence on the content perception. But when a fantastically looking page has low-quality content in it, this looks disappointing. Very often people put too much effort into impressive design, which has no value without quality content. Sometimes content is served in a corporate manner, a heavy and pretentious talk which is difficult to understand and unpleasant to read. Sticking to the ClueTrain manifesto ideas will help to serve your content in an attractive, clear and persuasive way.

The freshness of the content is extremely important. Frequently updated information covering the most recent development of your topic will attract more web-surfers and will make sure that many of them will become recurring visitors.

Critique to this approach.

The main weakness of the approach described above is the lack of an accurate measurement system for the evaluation of the project elements. Any attempts to assign points to assess the elements are based on intuition rather than on commonly accepted measurement scales. Therefore this diagram cannot be considered as a development tool. However its value as a framework assisting to understand the relationships between the parts of a project is high.