There has been quite some debate on the topic of web strategy on the blog; whether to do strategy or just do. I agree that there certainly is a real danger of getting stuck in all talk and no doing.
However, you do need to talk a lot about your web related work – with other people in the organisation. Imagine if you didn’t. Without regular dialogue with say content contributors throughout the organisation, you will have little chance of ever improving the quality of the content. Would you accept poor content as a status quo, or would you take it upon yourself to tend to everything?
Without some sort of strategy for where the website is going, it will be difficult to communicate well to those internal stakeholders. What exactly do you want them to do and why?
Currently, I’m interviewing practitioners on their experiences with web strategy for a new J. Boye report on the topic. They gave me some examples of what worked well, when communicating with a strategic purpose about the web site:
- Showing management a three minute video of a usability test of the site with users failing miserably
- Using Google ranking to explain SEO to content editors
- Showcasing competitors’ websites to the marketing department
Tangible examples such as these showing the problems certainly helped get the dialogue started. It’s a different approach than showing the regular progress and success stories though. But can it be helpful as a primer for strategy work? What do you think?
» Developing a web strategy – will it wear you out? - J. Boye » Blog August 10th, 2009 13:42
[...] mix of both approaches will be necessary. As I’ve argued before, you need to communicate strategically about web to both management and peers. A good web strategy has executive support in order to ensure funding [...]