Agile development, user experience and web teams

Has anyone else noticed the buzz around “Agile” development and user centred design (UCD)/user experience (UX) at the moment? If you’re part of a web team, you should probably be paying attention.

If you haven’t, below are a few links to recent documents talking about how the two come together. At the moment, if there is one key failing I can see for web teams, it is that most of the time software development is being discussed - not live websites. That’s an issue that will be pick up and addressed here in future posts…

Continue reading Agile development, user experience and web teams

In what I hope is an indication of the timeliness of this blog on web teams, Jeffrey Zeldman has just posted an article about web divisions – the lack of them and the need for them.

Whilst I’m not sure that I fully agree with the mandate that every serious website requires a web division, I agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment that this is an issue long over due for some more serious consideration.

Where web teams sit in an organisation is an important factor that often has a significant impact on a site’s identity. Unless the web team has it’s own division, a web division, it’s highly likely that the skill of the web team will reflect the purpose of that division. In many cases that leaves a gap both for the business and the site’s users.

The other side of the argument is that for a large number of organisations, their website/s don’t justify an entire division. For the sake of argument, I’m defining a division as an organisational group that has representation at board level, whereas a team does not.

I don’t think there is a simple one size fits all solution, however I think it’s definitely something we, as members of web teams/divisions need to think about more and discuss.

In order to progress this discussion I’ve started a google group on web teams. There’s nothing there at the moment, but if you’re interested, sign up and we can start to get this debate out in the open.

In this age of web 2.0* every web team should have a blog.

Obviously anyone reading this is likely to understand what a blog is (if not, just so you know, you’re reading one!).

In the context of a web team, they’re a great way of sharing information and keeping a group of people up to date. More importantly for web teams, they are one of the most influential forces on web and web design today. Oh, and they also lie at the heart of all social media.

There’s nothing new to blogs – they’ve been around for a while now, received a load of publicity and it seems that these days almost everyone knows what they are. But how many people on your web team blog? Or have ever blogged? Do you know what it takes to get one up and running or keep it going? Do you know what works and what doesn’t?

The simplest way to find out is to try one, and it couldn’t be easier to set one up. If you don’t have the resources in-house there are plenty of free ones that you can use.

Continue reading Why every web team should have a blog

These days you’ve got to have a pretty good excuse to justify not implementing Google Analytics on publicly available websites. Especially if you want a happy web team.

Having another analytics package is not sufficient. Neither is implementation unless you have some very strange custom built configuration.

Maybe you can get away with it if you have concerns about Google accessing all that information. However only in special circumstances does this hold true.

Continue reading Web team manager sin #1 - Not using Google Analytics.

If you found the last post about web teams irrelevant, this should be a consolation. If you’ve got a web team, then there is one essential thing you need to know before you can do just about anything else.

You need to know what they can do.

There are lots of ways to measure web teams, but one of the easiest is self-assessment. And to make it even easier, I’ve prepared something so that it should take no more than 5 minutes per team member. That’s less than an hour for most small to medium sized web teams for something that could give you valuable insights into your team.

Continue reading What can your web team do?

If you’ve got a website, you may be asking yourself questions about the people needed to manage it - the web team.

As you can imagine there’s no one size fits all solution. Web teams are as unique as fingerprints. But just like a fingerprint, the composition of your web team is a defining feature of your site’s identity.

Continue reading Got a website, now for a web team…