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THE AGILE WEBA Challenge to Re-examine the Methods and Processes

Used to Plan, Enhance and Optimize Websites

by Greg Kihlström

THE A

GILE W

EB | GREG

KIHLSTRÖ

M

By tracing the history of software development back to its beginning, this book forces a re-examination of the website design, development and optimization approach that many organizations take for granted.

Building upon agile software development and agile marketing practices that are still evolving, author and agency founder Greg Kihlström walks the reader through new ways to look at the way we treat websites, and plan for their redesign and optimization. The life of a website becomes a marathon with incremental improvements over time, instead of a sprint that ends when a new website is created to replace the previous one.

Kihlström builds on his experience designing and marketing interactive experiences for top brands, and running an agency since the early 2000s and provides a unique vision for how marketers can create websites that continue to grow in sophistication and effectiveness over time without the need for a continual process of redesigns.

This book is aimed at the marketer who wants to create the most ef-fective website possible, and is willing to take a fresh look at how they approach their organization’s online presence.

THE AGILE WEB:A Challenge to Re-examine the Methods and Processes Used to Plan, Create and Optimize Websites

by Greg Kihlström

Published by Carousel30Alexandria, VA

Copyright © 2016 by Greg Kihlström.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written must be obtained by contacting the author. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Published by:Carousel30500 Montgomery Street, Suite 650Alexandria, VA 22314www.carousel30.com

First Edition: August 2016

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Cover Design by Meli Steele. Cover Photo Copyright: lzflzf / 123RF Stock Photo.

FOR EVERYONE I’VE HAD THE PLEASURE OF WORKING WITH TO CREATE GREAT INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCES, AND EVERYONE WHO HAS TAUGHT ME

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT MARKETING. THERE HAVE BEEN MANY.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1: Before Agile

1| Before Mass Production

2 | The Rise of Mass Production

3 | The Rise of Customization

Part 2: Agile

Agile

Agile Marketing

When not to use agile

Part 3: Agile and websites

The website redesign

The Agile Web

Your Last Website Redesign

The agile web for agencies

An alternative: the hybrid model

Next Steps

Acknowledgements

About Greg Kihlstrom

INTRODUCTION“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”-Lewis Carroll

The world is moving so fast. And faster than ever. That’s what we have both heard and been telling ourselves for years. If you read enough history, you will know that the same rhetoric was used upon the invention of the steam engine as it was with the invention of the Internet. And we keep going. Imagine how everyone from marketers will be describing things twenty years from now!

While we’re here to talk about websites and the planning, design and development of websites, it’s important to know and understand how we got to where we are. We have inherited a method of marketing and designing websites that was born from a different era that had much different constraints than the one we’re living in.

The thinking that informs one age can either form the foundation for the next era or cause an inverse reaction to it. In the art world, it’s been generally accepted that the latter is true. Or more often, both happen simultaneously. This has happened for centuries, though rarely appreciated in real-time. It’s more often appreciated by historians who have the benefit of being able to look in hindsight, as opposed to making concrete sense of what is currently happening without the perspective of history.

In this way, the Agricultural Age gave way to the Industrial Age, which gave way to the Information Age. In parallel, in the worlds of art and architecture, Romanticism gave way to the Modern era:

“The distrust even of nature is, perhaps, the most obvious difference between Modernists and Romantics, but it demonstrates an overall trend of distinction the Modernists make in reaction to Romanticism: lack of moral self-confidence and disbelief in objective truth.” -Caitlynn Lowe, British Literary Modernism in Reaction to Victorianism and Romanticism, Knoji

In a way, the traditional software development lifecycle (SDLC) is an outcome of the Modern idea of efficiency, scalability, and a belief in the infallibility of logic and structure.

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It is a product of the culture that spawned the assembly line and mass production, of the advent of the skyscraper and mankind’s travels to space, in that a single unwavering plan can be created at the beginning of a process and have little or no alterations made while a project that takes many months or years unfolds based on that plan.

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But somewhere along the way, something called postmodernism happened. All of a sudden (or more accurately over a period of several years), a distrust of the established structures and ideas began to grow, and a willingness to experiment with smaller gestures, juxtapositions, and rejecting preconceived givens began to occur.

“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”-Umberto Eco

Something in the postmodern rejection of the conformist, modernist ideals gave way to the increased belief that there is simply not a singular way to do things. With this came a growing desire to be more flexible and nimble in the approach we take, even living in our current world of globalization and commoditization of most products and services. A combined philosophy of “I want it now” and “I want it specifically tuned to my tastes” gave way to the need to be agile.

So what do we mean when we say “agile?” We are going to focus specifically on what it means to marketers, but in order to do so, we will need to discuss a few other topic areas like art history, architecture and software programming. You’ll see, it will all come together by the end.

For the time being, let’s just define agile as a way to approach any task by working in small “sprints,” pausing, reevaluating what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and then proceeding. This stands in contrast to the method of creating a detailed plan at the start of a task, then following through on that task without stopping. This obviously simplifies both approaches, especially for large undertakings, but for now this distinction will suffice. We’ll go in greater depth on all of this soon enough.

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Which then gets us to the real point of this e-book: the website redesign and how we can start to do things better. Roger Dooley puts it perfectly:

“How many times has this scenario played out? The company website, launched with great fanfare a few years earlier, is starting to look dated. The layout looks like early 2005, and the home page, once the subject of massive battles for real estate, is a confusing mess. A few of the photos show people who no longer even work for the company, and multiple departments are complaining they aren’t getting the results they need.”Never Redesign Your Website Again - Really!” Forbes, July 24, 2014

The problem is a familiar one, and it plays out many times around the world every day. But what if there was a better approach that produced more consistent results and prevented your site from ending up looking dated, messy, and most importantly, kept it performing well? It doesn’t necessarily mean you will never have to redesign your website again, but it does mean that you and your organization will have a process and methods to keep your site up to date, relevant, and continually current.

The “agile web” is a continuation of a thought process that is informing many other industries and types of work all around us. Even the rest of the marketing world is switching to a more agile approach that keeps them nimble. Necessitated by a constantly changing landscape, marketers have been forced to adjust their plans as social networks rise and fall, new technologies come into existence, and preferences shift.

We’re going to trace this process of evolution from an era before mass manufacturing through today and hopefully a glimpse of tomorrow in order to find a way to get better results from our websites. Along the way, we are going to discuss how we got where we are today, and how we can modify our processes and our thinking in order to better utilize the tools we now have at our disposal.

Even though we’re going to take a little journey to get there, this e-book is primarily meant to be about websites and to help those

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who create, maintain and market them do a better job, get better results, and be more efficient about all of it.

I propose that a shift to an “agile web” approach where websites are not simply built, used and scrapped. I support one in which a website that isn’t only paid attention every 3-5 years when it is in a state of disrepair, but is a continually measured and optimized marketing tool that evolves, but rarely, if ever, undergoes a complete redesign. Instead, small changes over time keep it fresh, performing well, and a consistent, yet always improving, experience for customers.

This means that the current method of creating and maintaining websites needs to shift a bit. We’ll see how some organizations, like Amazon, are already doing it, and we’ll talk about how to start and maintain the shift within your company or agency.

Most of all, however I hope that we can continue a dialogue that is meant to continually improve the way we as marketers do things. As such an important part of any marketers’ tactics, the website is a critical communications, sales and customer service channel. It is important that we keep finding ways to innovate, improvise and adapt to improve the way we make, manage and optimize them.

WHO AM I?I’m an agency owner, a creative and marketer by background and training, and I’ve been building websites since about 1994. Using a little UNIX program on my university’s system called pico and discovering bit by bit and piece by piece how to write HTML, I was captivated by the promise of the Web early on, and before my university even had a formal program for interactive. Granted, Internet Explorer 1.0 came out around the time of my senior year in college, and any true multimedia designer was using Macromedia Director at the time. I cut my teeth on a combination of that and the rudimentary interaction that HTML afforded in the mid-90s.

After a college internship with Notre Dame’s digital group (focusing as much on CD-ROMs back then as websites) who designed and built websites for financial and other institutions, I worked for a

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nonprofit to build their first website. After that, I joined a tech startup in 1999 that grew from zero to over a million users of what we would now call either social networking or software as a service (SaaS) tools, and had the opportunity to build products for large brands like Coca-Cola, Lionsgate Films, and Amnesty International. I quickly built my chops from both a user experience, digital marketing, and technology standpoint.

Around the end of the early 2000s tech boom, I found myself a freelancer with a solid book of business doing creative work for the likes of AOL, GEICO, Starbucks, as well as some smaller brands, and formed a digital agency called Carousel30. Since 2003, we’ve built hundreds of websites, most of which use content management systems (CMS), some of which were brand new sites for new products or companies, and some were redesigns of existing sites. We’ve had the chance to work with brands like Toyota, Porsche, United Nations, Abbott, VW, and many more over the last nearly 13 years. This work has been awarded and recognized by some of the top names in the industry: The Webby Awards, Communication Arts, Advertising Age, the ADDY Awards and many others.

Over the years, I’ve kept an eye on website design and platform trends, and have started seeing an opportunity for marketers to change the way they approach website redesigns that helps companies, users, and even includes a role that agencies can play. I’ve had the opportunity to share my thoughts on these topics around the world at events such as Internet Week New York, Social Media Week, SMX Social Media, EventTech and more. I’ve also shared my thoughts in various publications such as The Washington Post, Advertising Age, iMedia Connection, Website Magazine and others. Finally, I’ve had the honor of helping to lead membership organizations with Board positions on local chapters of the American Advertising Federation (AAF), and AIGA, as well as the national Board of the AAF, and a few nonprofits.

What follows are my thoughts on how to improve the process of creating and maintaining great websites that are effective, efficient and engaging. It is clear that there are many others thinking along the same lines as well, and while I am happy to be able to share my thoughts in the pages that follow, they were influenced by many great minds before me.

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WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOTWhile we’ve already traveled back in time from the Agricultural Age to the present time, this e-book is not intended to be a historical reference, though we will cite several trends and movements throughout history which have led us to where we are today. I must confess, however, that some details may receive a superficial treatment so we can more quickly get to the primary point of this e-book.

This e-book is not intended to be a primer or tutorial on either the agile development methodology or its more traditional cousin, the software development life cycle (SDLC). It is also not intended to be an authoritative guide to how to plan and implement an agile marketing approach for your organization.

There are plenty of great books, white papers, and articles that discuss both topics in-depth, and if those subjects interest you more than the superficial treatment we shall give them here, you should have plenty to choose from. I will cover enough here to make sure the terms, goals and comparisons are understood, but will leave the deeper explorations to others.

Finally, this e-book is not geared towards a highly technical audience looking for a way to implement these ideas from a programmatic or coding level. The intended audience for this e-book is digital marketers who have, as one of their many responsibilities, oversight over their organization’s website (or in some cases many sites) as a critical marketing channel.

WHAT THIS BOOK ISInstead, the purpose of this e-book is to explore how to approach web design, upkeep and redesigns from an agile perspective and methodology. While some discussion and writing have been done on this subject, I felt there needed to be more importance and weight placed on what I believe to be a coming shift in the way a website is built, maintained and rebuilt.

Along the way, some historical context is given for the motivations

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and reactions that have caused shifts in thinking and approach, though for a true history lesson, I recommend finding other specific sources.

The current method of starting with a clean slate every 2-5 (each industry seems to have a “standard” timeframe) years doesn’t do justice to the time, effort, and ultimately cost that goes into the redesign process. Essentially, a typical company invests in their new website heavily, then, in more cases than not, lets it “sit” for a couple of years, only updating content until someone decides the site has become out of date.

It’s no surprise this is the case when websites are planned, designed, and constructed in rigid ways that don’t allow quick learning about what works and what doesn’t. Not to mention the fact that most sites, even those built on a content management system (CMS) that make content editing easy, but aren’t constructed in a way that continual improvement is part of the “build.”

The alternative to this, which is what I will be describing in detail later in this e-book, is a more evolutionary process (as opposed to revolutionary). This is an evolutionary redesign, which, as Allen Greer of Fuze puts it1, uses “the art and science of using strategic A/B testing to ensure your design updates lead to increases in conversions and revenue.” This is what I will refer to as the Agile Web, and it is what I (along with many others) believe is the next evolution in website marketing.

The good news is that the tools exist already to make this happen. As you’ll see, the thinking exists already as well, and has been applied to countless other types of ongoing projects both related to marketing and in many cases not.

NEXT UP We will begin by taking a look at the world before agile and explore what factors contributed to the development of the methodology, including several preceding steps which gave us the waterfall method. We’ll start our exploration with the beginning of computer programming, while also continue discussing what was going on in

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the world around us to give deeper context. By understanding both the world’s and the technology industry’s evolution, we can more clearly see how we’ve gotten where we are, and hopefully how to solve some of the challenges that older methods of doing things bring about.

Then we will get to a discussion about the way that website redesigns are approached and see if we can apply some of the more recent approaches to both software development and marketing to it.

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PART 1: BEFORE AGILE

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BEFORE MASS PRODUCTION“In Elizabethan times, shops were not stuffed with goods waiting for buyers. They were full of craftsmen waiting to fulfil orders.” Tim Hindle, The Economist, October 2009

There was a time when customers had choice, when they had direct access to the people making the products they used every day, and options for customization were limited solely to the cost the consumer was willing to pay. Materials were often locally sourced and local tastes were incorporated into the products made and sold.

Sound familiar? While the above could be said about today’s access to brands through social media, and the nearly infinite customization opportunities available through e-commerce sites and modern manufacturing methods, it’s actually referring to a time, long ago, before the Internet, before automobiles, before the industrial age. Yes, it’s hard to remember sometimes, but customization, adaptation and improvisation all existed before social media and smartphones.

As stated in the introduction, each new era is often a reaction to the one before it. We’re going to trace a bit of history to see how we got from a society in which almost everything was handmade, custom made, to one where most things were mass-produced, to one where we are back to a world where the process where we position ourselves to make quicker judgements based on more readily available metrics and feedback.

Smith goes on to say2 “With mass-production methods, manufacturers produce things in large quantities without having orders for them in advance. They worry about selling them later—the price they pay for enjoying economies of scale in the manufacturing process.” When you think about it, there is certainly a lot of risk inherent in any system which requires a lot of work to be done initially with no true method to see if it will be successful. In the Mass production method, the manufacturer takes a huge risk in “guessing” what the consumer really wants, and being comfortable that within the time to market, no external factors will push consumer opinion or preference in a different direction.

The same can be said of any software process, including website design and development. The longer the time frame of the project, the more can possibly change from both internal and external factors. We’ll discuss this a bit more later in this e-book.

We will, in fact, talk much more about making websites and how both the process and methodology of making websites, as well as the business of making them is changing and will continue to change over the next several years. We’ll talk about how a balance of standardization with the ability to customize and adapt over time is a perfect compromise, and a truly progressive step forward that takes advantage of everything we’ve learned about both mass production methods and agile approaches to manufacturing and marketing.

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THE RISE OF MASS PRODUCTION“Mark seven times and cut once” -Benvenuto Cellini, 1563

We’ll get back to websites in a little bit. To return to modernism and the Industrial Age, let’s discuss mass production and assembly line production. Adam Smith first described mass production in 1790, in “the Wealth of Nations,” and it was beginning to take shape in the late 1700s in places such as the gun factory owned by Eli Whitney3 in New Haven, Connecticut. Using a combination of standardisation of process and both skilled and unskilled labor forces, this type of production was possible.

Many factors influenced its creation, including growing and concentrated populations, and the relative ease of workforce training required. Mass production also shifted a different type of responsibility onto marketers, in that an entire product could be researched, designed, and created without having ever sold a single example. Instead of selling products made in small quantities, or one-off items, all of a sudden, marketers needed to generate demand and enthusiasm around a wealth of products that were yet to be created. The modern era of consumerism was born!

THE ASSEMBLY LINE“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Henry Ford, speaking about the the Model T in 1909

The assembly line would come a little after mass production had started, and while Henry Ford is often credited with inventing it (though this is untrue), he certainly mastered its techniques as he went on to mass market the Model T, selling over fifteen million4 over its lifespan which reached from 1908 to 1927.

“[The true genius of Henry Ford] was marketing. We think he was able to cut his selling price and therefore sell millions of $500 cars because his invention of the assembly line had

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reduced the costs. Actually he invented the assembly line because he had concluded that at $500 he could sell millions of cars. Mass production was the result, not the cause of his low prices.” Theodore Levitt, Innovation in Marketing

In order to create an ultra-efficient assembly line process, everyone needs to know what they are building, how they are building, and what exact role they play along the way. A rigid set of requirements, set in place well before anyone on the team starts making anything is a necessity in this situation.

Think about any number of large projects that either have a single outcome or that must mass produce many things that all look and work the same:

• Skyscraper• Televisions• Lunar landing• Sneakers• Ballpoint pens

When you plan to construct a 50-story building, it’s highly important that everyone involved knows what they are doing and where everything goes before the work starts. No one wants a surprise when the building is 85% complete. At that point, a single change can cost millions of dollars.

The same thing applies to a mass produced product like a television. A last minute change has many repercussions on how it is manufactured and marketed. At the price point of virtually any mass produced product, it simply isn’t feasible to go back and make a last-minute fix to hundreds, thousands, or millions of completed products.

This is especially apparent when it comes to product recalls. Take, for instance the Takata airbag recall, the largest such in United States automotive history5, which has affected seventeen automakers and in excess of 200 million vehicles. Consider the cost of such a recall, whose estimates range anywhere from $3.4 to $24 Billion6. Clearly, there is a price to be paid for an error made during the mass

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manufacturing process.

HOW DOES MASS PRODUCTION RELATE TO WEBSITES?You may be asking yourself how this relates to the subject of this e-book: websites, and their design and development. Well, it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to find a correlation between the amount of pre-planning, specification and design a large website requires, and the planning that an item that may be manufactured using mass production methods.

Both require a large upfront investment, which is technically unproven until the product launch. While many very sophisticated methods of research have been created and refined over the years which have made this easier, there is still a lot of risk involved in making wide-reaching decisions based on hypothetical evidence. This is what makes great researchers, great, but even the best can’t predict the unpredictable.

An advertisement for “New Coke,” circa April 1985. Image courtesy of

Wikimedia Commons.

Think about some of the worse product launch failures, and you can see the potential for disaster. In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola was struggling to maintain market share and losing ground to Pepsi. Coca-Cola executives initiated “Project Kansas” which had the task

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of researching and evaluating what could be done. Extensive market research7 found that one of the key differences between Coke and Pepsi was the latter’s sweeter taste. When focus groups were presented with a third, sweeter alternative to either Coke or Pepsi, they inevitably leaned towards the third choice.

The rest is history. Upon launch of the new Coke, there was immediate backlash by brand devotees, accompanied by lackluster sales to the general public, and after several attempts to undo the damage done, including the re-introduction of classic Coke, eventually the new recipe was phased out and discontinued.

Replace your organization’s website with Coca-Cola in that scenario. While you may not spend as much on a website redesign as Coke spent on a new formula, you can see how making large investments pose a risk that the end product may not be as successful as your research may suggest.

Am I saying that there is something wrong with mass production? Not necessarily, and certainly not in all cases. In many cases, mass production is not only a necessity, but a perfect solution to a huge challenge. But there may be a better way to produce many types of products, including websites, that allows for more flexibility in the process, more feedback to drive positive change, and less overall rigidity which can create a disconnect between the environment which existed during the project initiation, and the environment in which the project launches.

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BEFORE AGILE

EARLY COMPUTER PROGRAMMINGThe Backspace key was only useful in the rare case that you spaced past a column that you needed to punch; you could backspace and restrike the column. Of course if the column was mispunched, you swore under your breath, hit the release key to feed the current card, duped up to the error using the next blank card, then continued punching from that point. When you released this card (or it auto-released after column 80) you quickly grabbed the mis-punched card out of the flipper as it was being stacked and threw it in the trashcan, which was invariably on the left side of the keypunch for this purpose.Loren Wilton, a Burroughs/Unisys employee in the early days of computer programming

Let’s get back to something a little more “on topic” to the subject matter of this e-book: computer programming. While it’s important to know how we got where we did, it’s time to look more in depth at the origins of software creation.

It’s hard to believe, but until the 1970s, almost all computer programming was done via “punch cards,” which were hand punched by a key punch machine, and read by card readers. This process was used from the 1940s and was a tedious process which, as partially described in the quote above, required a lot of pre-planning in order to provide proper instructions to the computer.

The very first punch cards actually date back to the late 19th century where they were used to complete the 1890 census. These were the days when the term “computer” was actually a job description for a person. Early days indeed!

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Example of a computer punch card. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As time progressed and machines became more sophisticated (IBM was consistently the key player throughout the early history of the computer), the process itself still relied on pre-planning and having a detailed plan of what to do so that the cumbersome process of programming could be completed as quickly as possible without needing to improvise or rethink a series of calculations while operating the key punching machinery.

There was no “undo,” “copy and paste,” or any other time-saving tools we take for granted today. Instead, instructions were hand-punched into a paper card, which was then fed into another machine which translated duodecimal programming into hexadecimal computer-friendly language.

There was also a shortage of equipment and time. Access to both the programming equipment as well as to the computers themselves was limited, often limited to certain time periods with wait lists. A lot of pre-planning was necessary to get work done.

SDLC - SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE

“Une maison est une machine-à-habiter.” Translation: A house is a machine for living in.Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (also known as Le Corbusier)

As with many modern architects, Le Corbusier designed exteriors and interiors that were a reaction to the much more ornamental

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movements that existed previously. An embrace of the modern aesthetic and philosophy was to believe that houses were simply machines that humans occupied, lived, and slept in. No “home is where the heart is” in this case, but instead a belief and approach that a lifestyle can be designed for others, and that at least partially on the basis of good design, a “happy home” can exist.

Going back to our pre-Web, computer programming history, we now visit the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which consists of 7 distinct steps in the process, which we’ll discuss briefly. While there are varying explanations of it, they all generally conform to the below:

1. Evaluation The existing system is analyzed and evaluated for both strengths and deficiencies.

2. Requirements Specifications are created which offer improvements and fixes for deficiencies found during the evaluation

3. Design The proposed system is designed. Plans are laid out concerning the physical construction, hardware, operating systems, programming, communications, and security issues.

4. Development According to both requirements and design, the new system is develImplementation The new system is launched and used by its intended audiences.

5. Monitoring and Maintenance The system is maintained and monitored.

6. Sunset (Disposal) When the system is no longer useful, or needed, it is disposed of and replaced.

SDLC is still being used today, and spawned a number of different methodologies. In other words, you can adhere to SDLC while approaching it in very different ways. We’ll see that more when we learn about both the Waterfall and Agile methodologies.

Before that, though, does anything strike you as odd about step 7 (Disposal) in this process? Maybe it has something to do with a shift towards a “recycling” mentality in many aspects of life, but all of the

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time, effort and invariably money that goes into creating software and systems ultimately coming to an end seems like such a waste! Moreover, this is an end that is built into the process itself: planned obsolescence, so to speak. Of course, in many cases, this referred to sunsetting a specific version of software, with the expectation that a new release (version 2.0 instead of 1.0) would replace it.

Understanding the times that SDLC was originally created within, however, allows this sunset/disposal process to make perfect sense. Processing power, screen sizes, RAM, storage space were all increasing rapidly. Even operating systems and computer platforms themselves were undergoing such a rapid growth from one software release to another that assuming you would need to scrap a system or software after its current version had run its course makes sense.

These computers used to be the state of the art, and in quite stiff competition. Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This was also a time when this standardization of platforms simply didn’t exist. Between 1974 to 1979 alone, the following computers were released, all on distinct, incompatible platforms8: Apple II, Atari 400 and 800s, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET, Xerox PARC Alto. Not to mention that the CRAY Supercomputer was developed, IBM had several machines, and there were several other lesser known competitors.

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These days, however, we live in an area of branded platforms which may seem to change rapidly, offer much more stability than they used to. An “investment” is made in a brand such as Apple, Android or Windows, and your lifestyle and personality very much follow that choice. Despite our insistence on how quickly-moving our lives are, when was the last time a truly different computer experience was introduced? While Windows has reached mixed success with recent Windows releases, they haven’t truly reinvented the wheel, and in many cases they have taken a step backwards several times to bring more familiarity to users. Once could argue that it was Apple’s OS X—released in March 2001, yes, 2001—that was the last truly inventive operating system for a computer. In subsequent years, we’ve had a lot of new releases, but nothing truly groundbreaking.

Why mention this? Because the Waterfall method, which we’ll discuss in a second, is very much a product of a time when software ran its course, when, because of the plethora of often unproven systems available, a choice needed to be made on a single platform, but that decision had to acknowledge that in a few years, a brand new decision needed to be made. Incompatibility of code and platforms meant that writing a “cross-platform” solution simply wasn’t an option.

We’ll see later that SDLC also spawned the agile methodology, and technically both follow the overall conventions in that life cycle, though as you’ll see, they take you on a much different journey towards your destination.

WATERFALL METHOD

The Waterfall approach to systems analysis and design was the first established modern approach to building a system. This method was originally defined by Winston W. Royce in 19709. It quickly gained support from managers because everything flows logically from the beginning of a project through the end. 2009 Douglas Hughey. Information Systems 6840 course, University of Missouri-St. Louis.

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Although there are variations between the exact steps and names in the Waterfall process, the steps and overall process remains consistent in all. For the purposes of this e-book, we will briefly outline each, though some subtleties and details may get glossed over while we do so.

The chart below outlines the basic steps in the process:

The first thing that you noticed is how closely this follows the steps in the Software Development Life Cycle process. It is almost verbatim how it is mimicked. Despite the similarities, let’s briefly discuss each so that we make sure we understand them:

1. Requirements Analysis At this phase, business goals are matched with audience needs to create a set of project goals and requirements

2. System Design At this phase, the stakeholders of the project review goals and objectives, distilling them into a set of system specifications that determine what the software should do, how it should perform, and the way it should be structured. This also includes any visual

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documentation including interface design and other graphic design elements

3. Implementation Relying on the system design documentation, the system is built according to the specifications

4. Testing The completed system is compared to the design documentation, and checked for defects. Any bugs or defects are fixed.

5. Deployment The completed system is launched

6. Maintenance After the system is launched, it is maintained and optimized according to a maintenance schedule

One major similarity between the overall SDLC process and Waterfall is that there is a clear starting point, and there is a clear point when the system is completed, ready for testing and deployment. You’ll notice that Analysis and Design take place at the very beginning of the process, meaning that whatever is decided during those points is how the system will ultimately be built. The rest of the process is really just ensuring that what was specified earlier is successfully created, tested and launched.

Changes during the latter phases of a Waterfall project will often cause the process to restart in some small (or possibly large) way. We’re now going to talk in a little more depth about some of the difficulties in using the Waterfall method.

CHALLENGES WITH WATERFALLClients will often find it difficult to state their requirements at the abstract level of a functional specification and will only fully appreciate what is needed when the application is delivered. It then becomes very difficult (and expensive) to re-engineer the application. The model does not cater for the possibility of requirements changing during the development cycle. A project can often take substantially longer to deliver than when

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developed with an iterative methodology such as the agile development method. “The Waterfall Development Methodology”, 2006, Douglas Hughey.

Unfortunately, the Waterfall method carries with it quite a few challenges, such as the fact that any but the most minor changes requested after the initial requirements are gathered and documented will require timely and (often) expensive changes.

When discussing information architecture, wireframes, and specifications documents, those less experienced in seeing the development process through from start to finish may have a hard time visualizing the end product. This often means that there is often a disconnect between expectation and reality the first time they “see” the end product.

In addition, depending on what is being developed many weeks or months can pass between initial requirements analysis and the deployment of the software. A lot can change in the world between an initial idea and its release. Imagine being the Adobe Flash team in early 2007, before Apple famously began its war to destroy Flash, and how within five years, no mobile devices incorporated it10. You have a software development process in place for a product that will no longer exist in its current incarnation within a very short period of time.

You’ll also notice that “Maintenance” is the last step we mentioned in the process. This is the first point after the second step (“System Design”) where we can start to make any real improvements or changes. This means that any learning based on metrics and analysis really can’t be introduced until you’ve completed your entire development process. What if you learned halfway through the process that there is a major issue? You either proceed and finish according to plan, or start most of the process over again.

So how do we get around these challenges currently? Lloyd Wilkinson of Proven Method11 says:

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“Does anyone believe that the document under consideration specifies in its entirety and without reservation, the system the user wants to solve his business problem? Remember, this is not our first rodeo. We’ve been down this path before. Is there a clause in the document for change requests? Of course there is. Why are we already anticipating changes to a document and requirements that we have just spent 2-3 months laboring over to make sure we have covered all the bases and gotten everything just right?”

In other words, we avoid the challenges of the waterfall process being more rigid in scope by simply planning for change and acknowledging that we don’t know what we don’t know, and can’t anticipate that which can’t be anticipated. While it’s not the most elegant solution, it has been used for decades as the workaround solution to the problems faced using this method.

Clearly, there are some challenges with the Waterfall method, if there is a possibility that the data you use to create your requirements is subject to rapid changes or fluctuations. There must be a better method that allows more rapid learning to affect decisions.

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THE RISE OF CUSTOMIZATION“Just-in-time (JIT) is an inventory strategy companies employ to increase efficiency and decrease waste by receiving goods only as they are needed in the production process, thereby reducing inventory costs. This...represents a shift away from the older just-in-case strategy, in which producers carried large inventories in case higher demand had to be met.”Investopedia, “Just-in-time Manufacturing”

As marketers we talk a lot about shifting consumer behaviors as a potential risk for a failure to be more flexible to anticipate audience needs and preferences. This is one argument, so to speak, against a mass production model that requires a lengthy time to market. But there are other types of considerations that make long time to market undesirable as well. The cost of storing parts and manufactured goods for long periods of time can have quite an effect on overhead at even small organizations, let alone a global auto manufacturer like Toyota.

Although Just In Time (JIT) Manufacturing is not heavily documented, it is believed to have been born in Japan12, first in the shipyards, then to manufacturers like Toyota. The idea behind JIT is that inventory costs are reduced, because materials are only received when it is time to begin production, instead of the “just-in-case” method of always having extra materials around if they are needed.

Note that we still aren’t talking about JIT manufacturing not having predefined goals, so there is a clear starting point and a set of objectives to be accomplished. It could be to build a car. Or a coffee maker. But it is still very clear what you are manufacturing before you start. JIT doesn’t even have the ability to customize what is manufactured.

Compare this to the way that automakers now offer sometimes extreme methods of customization. Take Mini, for example, who claim over 10 million combinations when you visit their online car building tool. Other auto manufacturers have followed suit to varying degrees, capitalizing on a culture that is more and more demanding customization and personalization.

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You can even see this in the way that fast food restaurants with efficient processes and system like McDonald’s are being challenged by looser more customizable competitors like Chipotle which while even in most cases having fewer menu items, the upstart restaurants place customization first. Both McDonald’s and Taco Bell have recently taken steps13 towards allowing more and more customization of their products. These include mobile apps, modifications of menus, and the advertising and marketing that coincide with that.

MARKETING’S ROLEBetter monitoring and analysis tools allow marketers to not only see changes and shifts more quickly, but also to take action more quickly on what both is and is not working. I often say that just because you can doesn’t mean your should, but be that as it may, marketers are now given the power and flexibility to see, measure, report, and analyze a wealth of data that simply didn’t exist for previous generations.

Even before the rise of Big Data as a buzzword, advances in number crunching have steadily fed marketers more and more data with increasing speed.

A combination of a shift in overall culture towards manufacturing things just-in-time, a consumer preference towards customization, and a steadily globalizing economy, helped create the perfect storm for a more nimble, flexible approach. This is where agile enters the scene: in a world where a hunger for quicker decisions, more personal solutions, and more financial flexibility is needed.

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PART 2: AGILE

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AGILE

“So how do we control ourselves in an unpredictable world? The most important, and still difficult part is to know accurately where we are. We need an honest feedback mechanism which can accurately tell us what the situation is at frequent intervals.“ Martin Fowler

Let’s fast forward a few years from our discussion about SDLC and the Waterfall method of software development to the late nineteen eighties and early nineties. Computers continually get faster and smaller, and even telephones are getting smarter, smaller, and more portable.

There is an increasingly growing speed at which change is possible due to improvements in processing speed, access, memory, storage and any number of other factors, including even agreed-upon standards for exchange of data and interfaces. All of a sudden, a new technological advance means many things before are made obsolete.

The Coleco Vision was a fierce competitor to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Think about consumer video game systems. With each new product release came a major advance in graphics, gameplay, and interactivity. From an Atari 2600, to a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), to a Playstation (or rather Playstation 1 as it was later

called), to the very latest in 3D graphics possible with an XBox or Playstation, the two primary survivors in that market, things were evolving at an incredible speed. Think also about some of those companies who didn’t survive the competition.

ColecoVision, a fierce competitor to the Atari 5200 and Intellivision game systems, was released in 1982 with sales to the tune of 500,000 units that Christmas season14, yet a mere 3 years later ceased to exist. Part of the reason of its decline was a lack of games, but one wonders what a more nimble response and ability to market and adjust could have done for a company like ColecoVision. In fairness, Atari’s video game consoles didn’t fare much better w/ the two successors to the 2600 (the 5200 and 7800), the latter getting trounced by Nintendo and Sega partially due to a lackluster marketing rollout15.

But I digress. The important thing to note is that everything, particularly technology-related products has become a victim of increased risk of obsolescence in a short period of time. The anxieties brought about by this fact helped to foster the ideas that helped form the agile method.

HISTORY OF AGILE“But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.” ― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Agile has some early roots, whether it was Toyota in the 1950s or the 60s with Test Driven Development, where it was said that “a software system can best be designed if the testing is interlaced with the designing instead of being used after the design.”16

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In 1970, Dr. Winston Royce presented “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems,” a paper which criticized the waterfall system of development17. He stated that software shouldn’t use the same process as an automobile on an assembly line.

Fast forward to the early 1990s, with James Martin’s Rapid Application Development (RAD), whose primary idea was to reduce initial planning to more quickly get into development. This meant quicker collaboration, and workable prototypes. That in turn, created the ability to make course corrections more quickly in order to adapt to demand.

Also in the 1990s, Rational Unified Process (RUP) was developed by

a company later acquired by IBM. It included several key aspects

that would later be adopted by the Agile methodology later. It was based on three aspects or a tripod:

• A process that guides development which is adjustable

• A set of tools that automate the application of the process

• Services meant to accelerate adoption of the process and the tools

Notice that a key aspect of this process is the ability to plan for change, and quickness and ease of adoption is front and center.

Following RUP was Extreme Programming (XP) which saw its first project commence in 199618, and introduced terminologies such as “user stories,” and it’s iterative processes would seem very familiar to a contemporary agile developer.

In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was written by a group of passionate developers. While still adhering to the SDLC, yet differing tremendously from a Waterfall methodology, Agile was born almost as a movement, not simply as the solution to a technical challenge. In a way, it is as much methodology and process as it is philosophy. It starts with the line, “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

Agile then took off both in practice and in theory. In fact, anything

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that needed a little more sizzle was even being referred to as agile there for a little while. But in reality, it was helping a lot of software development projects get done quickly, and in many cases more efficiently than it’s waterfall counterparts. Timing of widespread agile adoption19 also coincides with the rapid rise of mobile phone usage and mobile app development. One wonders how many of iTunes’ app store downloads were created using an agile methodology, and what effect that had on the rise of apps.

Recently, in 2011, the Project Management Institute (PMI) began to offer certifications that further legitimized the Agile approach. The Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) in 2011 and Scrum Alliance certifications like Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) are now available certifications to project managers.

WHAT IS AGILE?“One should not first make the program and then prove its correctness, because then the requirement of providing the proof would only increase the poor programmer’s burden. On the contrary: the programmer should let correctness proof and program grow hand in hand.” Edsger W. Dijkstra, “The Humble Programmer,” (1972)

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The agile development methodology uses an iterative process to create products such as software. Through interactions that focus on specific goals and product features, called sprints, the product incrementally improves as it works against a product backlog that contains the features the end product must contain.

An agile project completes several such sprints throughout the project lifecycle, as opposed to a single development period in the waterfall method.

An agile project consists of multiple sprints that end in a new version of the product

AGILE TERMS“Agile methodology is an alternative to waterfall project management, typically used in software development. It helps teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. Agile methodologies are an alternative to waterfall, or traditional sequential development.”Agile Methodology

While there are plenty more terms used when developing using Agile, we’re going to discuss a few key ones as they will be relevant later on in the book.

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AGILE ROLESThere are 3 roles on an agile team:

• Product Owner• Plays a leadership role and represents the stakeholder’s

interests in returning ROI and creating a successful product.

• Scrum Master• This role is responsible for daily standup meetings as

well as to monitor and track overall progress of the project. They work to make sure there are no blocks to the project’s progress.

• Development Team• The role responsible for creating the product. They

assign themselves task based on direction.

AGILE TERMSBelow are a few terms that are helpful in order to understand our discussion of the Agile method:• Fail-Fast

• Process of stopping something as soon as it is going in the wrong direction. It refers to the ability of the system to report failure or anticipation of failure.

• Scrum• A framework to support product development teams.

Scrum consists of Scrum Teams and their associated roles, events, artifacts, and rules.

• Sprint (or Iteration)• A time-boxed (finished on the planned date and not

when it’s ready) event of 30 days or less that serves as a container for the other Scrum events and activities. Sprints are done consecutively.

• The requirements/tasks to be done in the sprint are defined at the beginning of iteration by the product owner and agreed upon by the team. Once the sprint is underway, the team is not supposed to respond to any new requirement or change requests.

• User Story• A way to define a software feature from an end-user

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perspective. • An epic story is a collection of user stories, allowing

more complex applications.

WHEN AND WHY IS AGILE BENEFICIAL?

“Because it’s simply impossible to get it exactly right the first time. Change is inevitable. Sometimes it is because the business changes. This happens constantly. Sometimes it is because, even with great care being taken, the analysts may not get the requirements and specifications just right the first time. This Waterfall methodology of requirements gathering and analysis, design, coding, testing, and implementation has proven to be ineffective in my own experience and to many others as well. By the time you get to implementation several months or even years after beginning, the system may not be what the business expected, or the business has probably changed and the system needs to change with it.”http://www.provenmethod.com/agile-development-brief-history/

Compared to the Waterfall method, there are several differences in an Agile approach. We’re going to contrast the two methods below:

Method Agile Waterfall

Guiding philosophy Believes that the best results are created iteratively

Believes that a strong set of requirements creates great results

How it handles change Ability quickly and efficiently make adjustments to scope in order to avoid potential failure

Changes to scope once set are often cost-prohibitive

Documentation Less likelihood of thorough documentation

Documentation is required to be thorough, thus ends up being extensive

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Teams Agile teams are more collabora-tive and less clearly defined

Waterfall teams are more clearly divided by phase, role and task

Budgeting Difficult to budget for on a fixed-cost basis due to fluidity of the process

Easier to bid on a firm fixed cost basis due to rigidity of requirements

Quality Often quality is improved due to the iterative and recurring testing and evaluation.

Features and systems are only tested thoroughly at one point in the process. Because of this, there is less opportunity to find defects.

Risk Project can get sidetracked if the project owner (or stakehold-ers) do not clearly define the requirements.

Changes to scope and requirements once the specifications are set are often very costly and can create major time delays.

As you can see, each has its place, and there is not a single correct answer. You need to choose the right approach based on your specific situation, but then let’s discuss a few times when agile makes particularly good sense to use.

WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A CLEAR SET OF REQUIREMENTS ALREADY

“The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” – Scotty, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

Let’s be clear first and make a distinction between goals and requirements. In order to start any project, be it agile or waterfall, you need to have a clear goal in mind. The difference between goals and requirements is that a goal tells you what you need to achieve in the end, but requirements tell you how the goal will be achieved. Agile doesn’t assume that the requirements are set from the beginning, but takes an iterative approach to achieve goals.

WHEN QUALITY IS TOP PRIORITYI say this for two reasons. First, the agile methodology often produces a better quality product due to it’s iterative nature and the more frequent testing it builds into the process. Each sprint is tested and evaluated, so that during the next sprint it can be fixed and/or optimized.

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I mentioned budget as well, though. The difficulty with an agile approach is that it is next to impossible to be able to estimate a fixed budget, since you don’t necessarily know the steps you are going to need to take to reach your goals. This is why it is hard to estimate a firm, fixed price for an agile project.

WHEN YOU’RE UNSURE OF THE RESPONSEThere’s nothing worse than launching a product, only to have it fail miserably. Think New Coke or Crystal Pepsi-style failures. Even on a smaller scale, how do you truly know how consumers will respond to your new launch? An agile approach and methodology means that you build smaller and grow incrementally. It means that you create more frequent tests and build in adjustment to the plan. It’s hard to imagine a new Coca-Cola formula being done in that fashion, but oddly enough smaller products and smaller launches are even happening in the cola world. Witness Pepsi’s 1893 brand, which launched in early 2016 with an advertising campaign that, with the look of an alcohol brand’s marketing20, is obviously only targeting a small niche of Coke’s clients.

This type of small launch, niche product target thinking is a perfect outcome of an agile approach to marketing which could almost be thought of as coming out of a start-up world mentality. Think about how your mind thinks differently about marketing a startup that needs to grow rapidly or die trying. You can’t wait 12 months to see if an ad campaign works when your investors need to see “exponential“ growth in a few weeks!

Who among us can truly say we know how consumers will react to anything anymore? While research is still incredibly important to do before you engage in any type of marketing (whether building a software application, a website, or a social media campaign), it only gets us so far. Eventually, our product will be to market and the market will speak for itself. With a rapidly diversifying consumer base in everything from tastes, behaviors, to device preference (or even device-agnostic) this makes predicting consumer behavior even more challenging.

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CONCLUSIONThose three examples are certainly not the only times you should consider an agile approach. In fact, most projects can use an agile methodology to much success, as long as the teams managing the project are clear on the benefits and pitfalls, and are acquainted with how to be part of an agile project.

The Director of Firefox has been quoted as saying, “We’re not tied to any specific development model. We’re tied to what is effective.”21 While there isn’t one single answer of whether to choose Agile or Waterfall, it depends on the specifics of the project.

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AGILE MARKETING

“Agile Marketing is an approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from Agile Development and that values:• Responding to change over following a plan• Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns• Testing and data over opinions and conventions• Numerous small experiments over a few large bets• Individuals and interactions over target markets• Collaboration over silos and hierarchyThe goals of Agile Marketing are to improve the speed, predictability, transparency, and adaptability to change of the marketing function.” Jim Ewel, “What is Agile Marketing?”, AgileMarketing.net

In addition to software development, the agile approach can be applied to many other things. All around us, as things are constantly changing and new options, variations, and customizable opportunities continue to grow.

While this e-book is intended to be about websites in particular, I thought it would be helpful to also touch on how agile is being used more and more frequently by marketers. The marketing and advertising profession has always been one that focused on finding consumers and matching brands’ messages and positioning to where their audiences were, what media they were consuming, and when they were consuming it.

As more and more options become available for marketers to broadcast their message, engage with consumers, and micro target their key audiences, it becomes necessary to review, assess and optimize their efforts on an increasingly short timeline.

By doing this, we quickly find ourselves applying an agile approach to our marketing. This means applying sprints and scrums to how we plan, strategize and execute marketing campaigns. Now we’re going to talk a little bit about what agile marketing really means.

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HOW DOES IT WORK?Agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which marketing teams collectively identify high value projects on which to focus their collective efforts. Teams use sprints (short, finite periods of intensive work) to complete those projects cooperatively. What is Agile Marketing, and Why Should You Care? MarketerGizmo, Apr 20, 2015

As you can see, our chart above has now changed from one focused on software development to one focused one marketing. Overall, however, the steps don’t change. Instead of planning our campaign out in every detail at the beginning of the year, we now undergo sprints that bring with them monitoring and optimization along the way.

You may be thinking to yourself, “but I already do that.” And in some ways, it’s true. You place a programmatic media buy because you know that it will be optimized. Some marketing methods lend themselves better to this approach than others, but you may also find that you are actually adopting more agile methodologies than you think.

The important thing to keep in mind is to keep your monitoring and evaluations regular. There is simply no more “set and forget.”

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It’s not enough to have a monthly or quarterly report that shows what happened. A report needs to be accompanied by analysis, evaluation and a list of what’s going to happen next. There should always be a test going on that is helping you to optimize something.

WHY AGILE MARKETING?“There’s a refrain I’ve heard on every problem project I’ve run into. The developers come to me and say ‘the problem with this project is that the requirements are always changing.’ The thing I find surprising about this situation is that anyone is surprised by it. In building business software requirements changes are the norm, the question is what we do about it.” —Martin Fowler, “The New Methodology”

While the quote above from Martin Fowler is about software development, it can easily be applied to marketing. We’ve moved beyond a world where we can know exactly what we will be able to do in 12 months. Things change too rapidly to do that anymore, so we need a more nimble approach. As Fowler says, the requirements keep changing, and often people are continually caught off guard, when they should be planning for change and accounting for it in their strategies.

In a 2014 study, CMO’s Agenda22 found that over 60% of marketing leaders identified being agile as a high priority, yet only 40% rate themselves as agile. They also found that marketers that identified as agile are 300% more likely to increase market share.

Our ability to measure everything we do as marketers has grown considerably and continues to grow as new platforms emerge, and new methods of targeting are developed. With the rise of big data from buzzword to multi-billion dollar industry means that we are now inundated with so many metrics that we can’t possibly report on them all. In fact, big data has been both good and bad in terms of effects on marketing and marketers.

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A WEALTH OF DATA ALLOWS QUICKER LEARNING

On the positive side, tracking is built in to pretty much everything now, number crunching applications abound, and if you can ask a question, it’s possible to answer it (though the cost may vary). On the negative, because there are so many metrics out there, so many platforms analyzing and tracking, and so many data points you can report on, it can sometimes be distracting (not to mention overwhelming) to have so much data at your disposal. As always, just because you can measure something, it doesn’t mean you have to report on it. Keeping a focus on your goals and strategies should help here.

The successful marketers are able to filter out the noise and focus on the metrics that matter, not simply those that are easy to see. Those who are able to adapt quickly to environmental changes are those who will thrive23. By tapping into the real-time and near real-time analytics and insights we are able to achieve, and intelligently applying those to our marketing efforts, the types of quicker decisions required in an agile process make more sense.

LIFE MOMENTSAnother reason to choose an agile marketing approach is that more marketers are approaching their work from an increasingly customer-centric one that utilizes specific experiences or life moments in order to create better connections with their audiences.

As Google puts it, with our multi-screen always connected lifestyle, there are additional“moments that matter” to a marketer24. The brands that can react quickly to significant moments makes a bigger impact on a consumer than simply sending one-way broadcasts that may or may not resonate at this point in time with an individual. That was the old style of doing things, the Mad Men era of marketing and brands.

The new way is by using all of the data and understanding we have about our audiences and using it in innovative, relevant, and truly helpful ways that consumers value. It means that when you’re buying a home, your favorite brand is able to adapt and help you

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with that important life moment. That’s the basis of a real brand-consumer relationship.

This is a genuine benefit of an agile approach in general, because we can more quickly respond, iterate, and optimize. To make changes is expected in an agile approach, instead of being the result of a mistake, a failure to perform by a tactic, or other negative reasons.

REAL-TIME MARKETING

In addition to moments in time that are able to be anticipated, real-time marketing has been enabled by social media in order to react to things in the present. Brands, like Oreo’s Super Bowl moves in 2013 when they capitalized on a lighting malfunction to come up with the real-time “Dunk in the Dark” campaign. Jonah Berger wrote an article in Wired in which he raised a question of real-time marketing’s true value. “Is this going to sell more Oreos at the end of the day? Hard to tell. [But] it definitely makes the brand seem like a more clever, more interesting, sharp brand. So in terms of brand equity, this is as effective, if not more effective, than just showing another Super Bowl ad.25”

Real-time marketing also allows us to get real-time insights, Riley Gibson writes26, and then poses a question: instead of simply pushing content during the Super Bowl, what if Oreo’s marketing team asked questions or found other ways to get data or feedback beyond likes and shares? That type of real-time marketing, the one where there is reciprocity, engagement and useful data gathered, can be very valuable, indeed.

Another way that real-time marketing plays out is through automated things such as programmatic ad buying. By using real-time bidding and artificial intelligence to place advertisements, there are many components of programmatic that simple can’t be planned in advance. In a way, they force a more agile approach to thinking about marketing simply by their very nature.

THERE ARE TOO MANY OPTIONSEven if you have a Fortune 50 marketing budget you simply can’t

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get 100% coverage on every platform your customers use. There are simply too many choices you can make, and even with the plethora of measurement and analytic tools out there to help you narrow your decisions, you can still only focus on so many channels at the same time, regardless of the size of your team.

Because of this, an agile approach to marketing makes a lot of sense. You launch, test, measure and optimize in quick sprints which allow you to quickly and efficiently add and remove platforms and tactics which are underperforming. This keeps you rapidly assessing the different platforms and channels you can utilize in order to as quickly get to what works.

Once you find what works, you can then just as quickly work to optimize it through iterative sprints that are designed to tell you quickly and accurately what is performing well, what needs to be optimized, and what isn’t worth continuing.

TASTES CHANGE RAPIDLYChanging tastes is certainly not a new phenomenon. We talked earlier on in the e-book about how one era gives way to another, with the one which follows serving as a reaction to the previous era. It is no different in the arena of consumer preferences. As marketers, we strive to be as attuned to this as possible, and use our understandings and analysis as the basis for countless important decisions that affect the success of the business(es) for which we do the marketing.

This change of preference, or pattern of fashionable trends, extends from more personal decisions that are not shared publicly, to the adoption of social networks, whose purpose is to broadcast one’s actions to at least a limited community. But even within the social media world, things move quickly.

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Friendster was the first major social network to pave the way for many more in the future. By the time it redesigned in 2009 (pictured above), it was too late to turn things around. 5 years later it would shut its doors.

The original Myspace pages (pictured above) allowed a lot of customization, sometimes to the detriment of the MySpace brand itself. A high-profile redesign was too late to turn its fortunes around.

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Then came Facebook, with a cleaner, more streamlined profile. In 2009, Facebook’s interface (pictured above) showed the beginnings of a more mature social media platform.

Remember any of these social networks? Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, Friendster?

It’s clear that some social media platforms are the “darlings” of consumers while others fall by the wayside, even if they do achieve temporary success. A brand that doesn’t constantly monitor its presences and usage trends amongst its consumers can often place too much importance on a single social channel (or really any marketing channel, for that matter) and wake up to find its core audience had moved somewhere else.

According to Pew Research Center, with over 65% percent of adults are on social media27, there is opportunity to reach a broad audience there, yet the fluctuations in usage are important to always keep in mind. In 2002, Friendster was the most popular social network. Within a few years, first MySpace, then Facebook quickly replaced it as the most popular network, and as of June 14, 2015 Friendster shut its doors.

Beyond this continually shifting social media landscape, and rapidly growing mobile usage of the internet, it is estimated

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that the number of internet connected devices will surpass the number of mobile phones by 201828. What about other trends and opportunities, such as the immersive experience that 360 video allows. With YouTube and Facebook adopting it recently, it seems like another opportunity.

This is why an agile approach to your marketing is helpful because consumer preferences and market factors can rapidly shift, yet you will be able to adjust, adapt, optimize and evaluate your efforts more quickly.

HOW TO DO AGILE MARKETING WELL“For the perfectionists out there, this may be a frightening thought. Many marketers have built their careers on following a series of highly detailed plans based on copious data. You still can, and should, draw on customer research, but leave room for growth. Map out your starting point, in as much detail as you wish, and then roughly outline your vision for the first few milestones in your campaign, keeping your plans tenuous and easy to adjust.”—Jason Demers, Harvard Business Review

Just like anything that requires change, certain parts may be easier than others to make a change from a traditional marketing campaign approach to an agile one. Jason Demers from Harvard Business Review29 advises marketers to think of their efforts as an “outline” not a “campaign.” This means less rigid requirements are set at the beginning, similar to how software development changes when you move from a waterfall approach to an agile one.

This has many benefits, the most of which is that you don’t have to wait for a large campaign to end in order to determine if it is successful or not. You can make it successful because you have more incremental control over it. You can adjust, add, and remove things in order to optimize time, budget, and resources. You aren’t ever wondering if things are working. Instead, you know exactly what is and isn’t working and you’ve built a plan that allows you to adjust accordingly.

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One example that touches on this, is the ever popular “Elf Yourself” campaign by OfficeMax, which has become a perennial favorite and achieved an amazing amount of traffic, press and publicity since its creation in 2006, with over 36 million website visits and 11 million elfs created30 in its first year alone.

You might think that OfficeMax simply got lucky by coming up with a great concept that somehow resonated with the public. The interesting thing to note about this campaign, however is that the original “Elf Yourself” website was one of twenty different websites that were created that year. Yes, that’s right: there were 19 other holiday-themed websites created by OfficeMax for the 2006 holiday season. “Elf Yourself” just happened to be the one that worked!

What if OfficeMax put all of their eggs in a different basket? In other words, what if one of those other 20 websites31 was picked as the single concept? Perhaps they would have had a successful holiday season, and perhaps their one holiday website concept which was chosen would have engaged a few users. Instead, by taking a smaller approach with all of them, they were able to listen, adapt, and optimize quickly, and create one of the most successful digital holiday campaigns ever.

So now that we’ve sold you that an agile marketing approach should be considered, how do you do it well? Let’s talk about three components of a successful agile marketing program.

BACK TO BASICSLet’s remember again that both an agile and a waterfall approach require clear goals to be set. The difference isn’t the destination, but the journey. Your goals, KPIs and strategies don’t need to change if you want to take an agile approach to your marketing. You just take a very different process to get to your goals.

Many marketers have been successful with the agile approach. Cory Eridon of HubSpot explains it this way: “Wins happen for agile marketers all the time because they are used to learning quickly and aren’t afraid of failure—because working on a day-to-day basis to

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achieve your larger goals helps you bounce back from your flops in record time, with minimal resources squandered during the pursuit.”

This means that, through a series of small course corrections at short frequencies, agile marketers can often reach their end goals more quickly because of an acknowledgement that sometimes setting a rigid plan at the beginning of a campaign is not always the best approach, and that learning needs to occur over time in order to adjust things towards your goals as quickly as possible.

BUILD IN TESTING FROM THE START

“Worse yet is the rejection of upfront requirements. The basic observation is correct: requirements will change, and are hard anyway to capture at the beginning. In no way, however, does it imply the dramatic conclusion that upfront requirements are useless! What it does imply is that requirements should be subject to change, like all other artifacts on the software process.-Bertrand Meyer

While the quote above was meant to apply to software development, it can just as easily apply to marketing. The best laid marketing plan often hits a point of reckoning once the campaign actually launches. While we love it when there are pleasant surprises and the efforts over perform, there is never, in my experience, a point where we can’t further optimize our efforts to continue to improve things.

With our ability to test so many more aspects and make quick adjustments, it means we have a huge opportunity to get better results quicker. Any marketing effort that my agency performs, for instance, has testing and optimization built in at intervals that are pre-determined. This means that we know from the start that as much as we research and plan, we are going to need to make adjustments.

Instead of simply following conventions and “best practices,” an agile marketing approach requires constant scrutiny and

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reevaluation. Scott Bringer refers this to “Numerous small experiments over a few large bets.32” While testing and optimization is certainly not a novel concept, the rate at which changes are made and the extent of changes in directions is increasing.

PLAN FOR THE UNKNOWN Finally, the agile approach allows you to plan for the unknown. While no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy, with a combination of watching trends and knowing that you need to leave room for improvisation, using an agile approach lets you make changes and course corrections while you run your marketing plan.

This results in a way of thinking and approaching your marketing to be as “future proof” as possible. Of course no one can predict the future, but making the incremental changes required by an agile approach, and always keeping your goals and strategies in mind, allows your KPIs to be your “north star” as you travel the uneven terrain of the marketing landscape.

All of this being said, is agile always the right choice? Next we’re going to explore the times when an agile approach may not make the most sense.

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WHEN NOT TO USE AGILE“Having said all that, there are still circumstances in which the waterfall method can be suitable – for example, where requirements are guaranteed to be unchanging and there is very little uncertainty or if the project if very simple – but those circumstances are becoming fewer and farther between. Also if an organisation and the people involved in the project are not in a mature enough state for Agile it may be more appropriate to use traditional project management methods.”-Jim Bowes, Jul 17, 2014, Manifesto.co.uk

After all the love just given to agile approaches and methodology, could there ever be a time when an agile approach will not work? Are there times when a waterfall approach is the right way to go?

There are several scenarios where it can often be ill-advised or at the least potentially complicated to try to used an agile methodology. We’ll talk through a few here.

WHEN THE OVERALL OBJECTIVE IS NOT CLEARBut isn’t the point of agile that you don’t know exactly where you are headed? Contrary to what some believe, this is not actually true. To be successful with any project you must always know what the measure of success is. The difference between an agile and a more traditional methodology is that while both require the measure of success to be understood ahead of time, the agile approach knows where to go but determines how to get there along the way.

Let’s make a distinction between knowing the objective and knowing the path to get there. In other words, a project without a clear objective is going to require the proper planning and process to ensure that objective is discovered. If you know what the goals are, but aren’t clear how to get there, then an agile approach makes a lot more sense.

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WHEN TIME AND RESOURCES ARE LIMITED It can be difficult to tightly manage your budgets when the approach you are taking with your project has some open ends. For instance, from a budgeting perspective, most agencies who would work with you in an agile methodology is going to be very reluctant to provide a firm fixed budget and contract for work that is as yet undetermined.

A time and materials basis makes more sense in this type of agile approach, since the approach taken to achieve the goals is iterative and the path to the goals is not clearly defined. For organizations with very tight budgets, the anxiety that a project whose exact deliverables and scope are not clearly defined might not be tolerable.

In these cases, the waterfall approach, which makes it clear exactly the scope of work, the timeline and the budget required from the beginning makes more sense. The waterfall approach allows clearly defined requirements to be accurately mapped out over a project timeline, and estimated and budgeted accordingly. Because of this, a firm fixed price bid is possible, where although there is some risk by the vendor of exceeding that budget when unknowns are not accounted for, or scope is not managed properly, risk itself is much lower because of the time and effort spent on documenting everything that needs to be done.

TOO MUCH TIME HAS PASSED SINCE THE LAST REDESIGN

“Because waterfall development stresses the end product over process, it has remained prominent in these industries where quality (and safety) over speed reigns supreme.”-Rutul Dave, CMS Wire

In addition to the items above, the last case where it doesn’t make sense to skip a website redesign and use an agile approach instead is when the amount of time that has passed has allowed many things to pass.

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When this happens, one (or more) of the following is generally true:

• The content, display and platform are all hopelessly out of date, and are not in a state as to be adjusted independently

• The brand has changed so fundamentally that the positioning, aesthetics, and voice are hopelessly out of date

• The products and services mentioned have evolved so much that the structure, content and focus of the website differ so greatly that it would be next to impossible to realign them using the current architecture

As you can see, while we may be making a case for adopting an agile way of thinking, and an agile methodology in your work, there are definitely times when it may not make sense to use it. We’ll talk in a couple chapters about this scenario, or as we refer to it, your “last web redesign.” In the meantime, we’re going to talk about the web redesign in general.

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PART 3: AGILE AND WEBSITES

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THE WEBSITE REDESIGN“A beef filet cooked for 15 hours by 30 cooks doesn’t necessarily taste better than a cheeseburger”- Oliver Reichenstein

We’ve gone on quite a journey so far, from the beginning of the industrial age, through the early days of computer programming, to agile development and agile marketing. Now it’s time to get to the main topic, and what we’re really here to discuss: the website redesign.

This brings us back to the waterfall method of software development and marketing. The website design and development process is based strongly on the fundamentals of the software development lifecycle. It assumes that with one big build (or series of pre-planned phases in many cases) a great new website will be built that will work perfectly for an organization for...all of 2 to 5 years! And then the process will start all over again, usually from scratch.

In 2010, social bookmarking sites were still a popular thing, and Digg was a leader in the space, though it was steadily losing ground to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, who more closely tied shared content with groups of friends and followers. Digg was a link-sharing site first, and a social network second. In order to combat this, Digg shifted from curating links and its list of content from what was popular across its own network, to what was popular in a user’s network. It sounds like a great idea, except most Digg users spent very little time building a group of friends and followers (they did that on Facebook or Twitter). With a redesigned website launch in 2010, all of a sudden, Digg lost roughly 26% of its audience33, and despite a 2008 valuation of $160 million, ended up selling for only $500,000 in 201234.

What if Digg had taken a more incremental change to the redesign of their site? They could have introduced some features that favored listing what a person’s Digg contacts like while keeping the listings of what links were popular with the general population. Perhaps they would have learned (and perhaps even learned quickly) that even though a similar approach is what made Facebook and Twitter

increasingly popular, it just wasn’t what people wanted from Digg.

So what does this mean for you and your organization? Let’s talk a little about how people get into situations like this in the first place.

WHY DO WEB REDESIGNS HAPPEN?You know the drill: 3 years (or maybe it’s 2, 4, or 5) have passed since your organization last redesigned your website. Remember the good times? Meetings to finalize the RFP, meetings to review vendor proposals, meetings with the chosen vendor, meetings… Well, you get the gist.

After all of that planning, meeting, documentation, and excitement, you launched a new website. It had tons of fancy features, brand new content, incorporated the latest thinking in user experience and information architecture and had a modern look and feel.

Everyone had an opinion once it launched (where were they during the planning phases?) and there was much excitement, maybe a few tense discussions, and a few Monday morning quarterback ideas.

Then, about 30-45 days after it launched, most of the company went back to their “day jobs” since planning a website really just got added to their workload since it only happens every few years. Everyone whose daily job didn’t involve managing the site was relieved that they didn’t have to worry about it anymore and assumed that the website would “take care of itself” -- if they thought about it at all.

Meanwhile, a few individuals in Marketing and IT were left as stewards to keep this new behemoth up to date while everyone went back to their daily business and all of a sudden 12, 24, 36 months go by.

In that time, a number of things have happened, which can be categorized in two main buckets: internal changes and external changes. In a little bit, we’ll discuss several examples of each.

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WHAT DOESN’T WORK ABOUT TRADITIONAL WEB REDESIGNS?

Regardless of how many people are involved or how many hours internal team members spend on perfecting every pixel, the epic redesign is one of the most haphazard and careless decisions a brand can make. Allen Greer, Co-Founder, Fuze, on the Kissmetrics Blog

While the website redesign process has served many organizations for going on twenty years now, there are plenty of flaws with the system. This is not a blanket statement, of course, to say that a web redesign is never in order. It is rather a critique of how to make better websites through a process that truly improves your organization’s website each time you make changes.

Now we’re going to discuss a few reasons why the traditional website redesign process is flawed.

DIFFERENT IS NOT ALWAYS BETTERAs we discussed in the beginning of this e-book, one new era was often a reaction to the previous one. Much the same, website redesigns can often start as a reaction to the current (soon to be previous) site. While it’s a perfectly natural phenomenon, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some items to be cautioned about.

Keep in mind that making a website different doesn’t always make it better. The technology may be updated, it may use a responsive design instead of not being mobile-friendly, but how much is really better about it?

In the case of a complete redesign, this radical change may or may not benefit your company. This approach is what Jared Spool calls the Flip-the-Switch strategy35. Spool says, this is “the most ineffective way to get major changes into a design.”

Furthermore, when you change everything about a website, how can you determine what is the trigger for any improvements (or any declines, for that matter) when there are multiple changes to track, and with those changes, many possible variations. This wholesale

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change doesn’t really help you to figure out what works or what doesn’t, so in a way it didn’t help you truly learn from last time. You are simply replacing one website that has good and bad things about it, with a new one that has good and bad things about it as well.

“SET IT AND FORGET IT” MENTALITYComplete redesigns take a long time and by the time they are completed, it’s possible more change has taken place. This already sets the website behind from the moment it launches. The waterfall process used to create the site assumes that once the goals and objectives are “set”, there won’t be any major modifications. Keep in mind that many website redesigns can take nine to twelve months, and in some cases, many more depending on the complexity and approval processes involved.

In addition to this, there is also a phenomenon where, despite the excitement and build-up to the launch of a new site, several things often happen:

• Although staff training has been performed, only a handful of staff continue to update the site a few months after launch.

• Although a clear plan for administration of the site has been created, many sections of the site fail to be updated on a frequent basis, thus creating an imbalance of some areas that are kept up to date and others which are not.

• After several months (or in some extreme cases, years) the website is so far out of date that at its shear mention, eyes roll, or there is a common accepted complaint internally that “you can’t find anything on our website.”

When I was a kid and didn’t want to brush my teeth, my dad would always say, “ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.” While ignoring a website won’t make it go away, it will make it less and less relevant. Here are a few warning signs that you may be in trouble:

• It’s an “in-joke” in your company that the website isn’t very good. Instead of trying to improve it, there is a collective apathy about how it doesn’t work well anymore.

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• You have several departments that have constructed microsites with outside agencies.

• You overhear someone saying “Oh, I never direct anyone to our website any more.”

Of course, you may have anecdotes of your own as well, but most of them probably center around a collective agreement that the website is useless and beyond repair. Not only is this not constructive, but it’s often not even true. Even some of the worst websites can be optimized to work better.

DESIGN BY COMMITTEEMaybe this one isn’t solely relegated to the waterfall method as opposed to an agile one, but the “design by committee” mentality at play in many website redesigns often comes with negative results. It’s true that if something isn’t designed for someone, it’s designed for no one. That may sound drastic, but it’s true.

This gets back to branding fundamentals. If you’re trying to be attractive to everyone, you won’t be truly attractive to anyone. Think about some of the largest brands like Apple or Nike. Even though they make products for just about everyone, their branding and audience targeting is actually quite specific. There may be different audiences for different products, but overall, the brand must stand for something and it must be able to be easily defined and described.

Design by committee often creates an end product that doesn’t really seem targeted to anyone. So how do you balance the need to get stakeholder sign-off on decisions being made without involving everyone in each and every design decisions? It definitely helps if you clearly define roles and responsibilities, and it helps when unique elements are separated to a point where those with expertise and authority on design-related items can have the final say.

MASSIVE CHANGES CAN HAVE NEGATIVE EFFECTSChanging too many things at once makes it difficult to test what works. If you test individual elements alone, you have a better

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chance of increasing conversion rates further. Much better to take a more scientific approach to optimizing your website by asking the right questions, then testing your site to see what moves the needle.

You can also hurt your website’s Search Engine Optimization if large changes are not done properly. Beyond the usual redirects, content strategy and keywords, radical changes may affect other external links or other factors that might be contributing to your current page rankings.

Your users also suffer from a sudden change, which is not a good thing. Greer continues by saying “Do-overs are typically driven by a desire to keep up with trends or competitors and don’t take into account how actual users feel about the product.” These extreme modifications may make the overall page look nicer, but if you’ve frustrated your existing users, have you really won?

Positive learning from the current site (the one to be replaced) is often lost through a process that assumes the current site simply doesn’t work. Instead in reality, it’s more likely that, while flawed in several respects, there are probably many things about the current site that actually work.

THE WORST REASONS WEBSITE REDESIGNS HAPPENThere are several bad reasons why websites get redesigned. While it might still be inevitable, it’s good to keep a watch out for ways to avoid these situations.

One of the worst reasons that website redesigns happen is having a poor design from the start. This can be the result of many different approaches to the last redesign. Often, you may have inherited a website from a previous team or employee and really had no say in the matter. They might have mismanaged a redesign or might have hired an agency that didn’t truly understand how to build a great website. While it may be necessary to undo the harm done by those previous creators of your website, it’s still a shame that all of that time and resources were put into something that doesn’t work anymore.

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Outdated content can also be a reason why websites get redesigned. In some cases, this may seem like it requires a complete redo of the site, when perhaps simpler changes to the writing and graphics of the site may make a huge difference. This is completely dependent on how long the content has been “sitting” with no edits or updates. Often, organizations will complain that the site no longer describes the products, services, or even mission of the company accurately any more. What is a shame here is that all of these things (unless there isn’t a CMS) can usually be updated, they just simply are overlooked or neglected. So instead, we get into a situation where the backyard gets overgrown while no one is tending it. All of a sudden you look out your back window and the grass is tall, weeds have sprung up, and it’s an overwhelming site.

Staff changes can often bring with them a desire to change the direction of a website. With a change in leadership and approach, can sometimes bring irreconcilable differences between their new strategic approach and the current branding and marketing presence. Because many organizational websites are built on platforms which don’t allow an evolutionary approach to modifications, this often results in an increase in website redesigns.

Similarly, departmental changes in management or “ownership” of the organizational website can create the need for change as well. While in the early days of the internet, a company’s IT team primarily handled the maintenance of the website, the trend has been towards more shared responsibilities. This supports the agile web approach, the more that teams can take sole responsibility for any of the 3 areas of content, display and platform.

Finally, in some organizations, website redesigns happen because that is how the budgeting process works. Every x years (each one is a bit different), money gets put in the budget for a redesign. This is done regardless of whether the current website is performing well or not. Once the time comes, it’s time to redo the website. The downside to this is that there is seldom a lot of learning that is passed from one website redesign to another. Each time, so many months have passed between new websites that many of the insights from the last go round are lost with employee turnover, shifts in leadership, and other factors.

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MORE LEGITIMATE REASONS FOR A REDESIGNIn addition to some more avoidable reasons, there are a few that are more understandable. These would still not require a wholesale redesign if content, display and platform were separated properly, but until an organization makes that decision, it is a legitimate excuse to pursue a redesign when faced with them.

Rebranding or repositioning can be a reason that many organizations redesign their website from scratch. This means that the overall branding and look and feel (display) changes, the way they describe themselves and their products (content) changes, and in some cases, their departmental structure, methods of measurements, and even technical infrastructure (platform) changes.

Brand changes can range from the complete overhaul of a company’s identity, including logos, fonts, colors, typefaces and more, or they can be more subtle modifications. Either way, any significant change to your brand will definitely need to be reflected on your website. The flexibility of your site, and how extensive the graphic and text changes needed, in addition to the modification to content strategy required, may mean that some larger changes to your website are required.

You’d be surprised how even with a complete rebrand, you don’t necessarily need to scrap and start over, but the way many websites are neglected over time, it is sometimes necessary.

Technological shifts can occur that cause a website to no longer meet the needs of an organization. The widespread adoption of responsive design for websites instead of creating separate mobile and desktop sites (or simply ignoring mobile users), is a reason I hear many organizations are making big changes to their sites still. Those that have yet to make this change truly do need to hurry to follow the rapid rise in mobile traffic.

Keep in mind that a shift to responsive, if the website is approached properly, may only affect the “display” portion of your site. You don’t necessarily need to rethink all of your content, and most modern content management systems are more than capable of handling responsive frameworks, with many being built with responsive

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in mind from the beginning. Some take an adaptive approach for content (showing the correct size image, for instance, depending on the viewport/screen size), and others require more effort on the part of your developers or programmers, but no major CMS platforms at the time of writing this are not in some way addressing responsive design.

CONCLUSIONWhile it is important to carefully consider if you really do need a website redesign or not, there are some truly legitimate reasons to do so. We’ll talk in a few chapters about this “last” redesign so that you can make the most of it.

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THE AGILE WEB“Companies are creating thousands and thousands of changes when they do this “flip the switch” method [with a website redesign], and they have no idea what impact each of those individual change is having on their end result, their conversion rate, their revenue, their lead generation, or whatever their goal is for their business.” Chris Goward, On the RogerDooley.com Podcast, “Ep #13: Conversion Optimization with Chris Goward”

So why did we spend all this time talking about SDLC, Waterfall, and the early days of computer programming? Because it’s important to see that the mindset which has been driving our processes and decisions is based on technologies and methodologies which were, at the time, very practical, but are no longer needed.

After exploring the types of thinking and reactions that led to a more agile approach in other fields, it’s time to explore how to apply this to the website redesign. Despite many web developers, app developers and software developers embracing agile for many other types of projects (web applications, mobile apps, software or software as a service), agile has been very slow to take off when it comes to the website redesign process.

Consider Jared Spool’s “$300 million button.36” In his work with a major online retailer, this user experience consultant found that users were getting stuck at a certain place in the checkout process which was costing the company a lot of sales. With a seemingly simple change, website visitors ceased to be blocked and ended up purchasing $300 million more in items from the retailer. By changing a “register” button that seemed to discourage people from proceeding, and replacing it with a “continue” button, all of a sudden users felt free to complete their purchases.

Note that this didn’t involve a complete overhaul of the checkout process. In fact, doing a complete redesign of the process might not have even factored this subtlety into the equation. Instead, focusing on smaller, subtler details and making incremental changes paid off in a really big way. While you may not necessarily get such dramatic results, you can see how one small change can make a huge difference.

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WHY AGILE WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT?This leads us to further discuss why we want an agile website approach and what are the benefits? The easiest answer is because it’s not just about a website and how it looks or even performs in a silo. It’s about a holistic marketing approach that favors continual improvement and optimization over simply changing to be different and new.

Can your marketing efforts wait or hold for a large-scale website redesign to happen? Keep in mind that often these projects take upwards of 12 months and with such a large scale and the inherent dependencies, that can even bring further delays.

Or worse yet, what about a new website launch that fails to meet expectations even if it does launch on time? Consider the web redesign of British retailer Marks & Spencer, which cost nearly 150 million pounds37 and was met with major consumer backlash and negative feedback. This complete website overhaul ended up contributing to an 8.1 percent dip in sales that year for the retailer.

It’s time for all of your other marketing efforts and your website to align in lock step instead of having a disconnect between them. As we discussed previously, if you are taking an agile approach to your marketing, you can’t have one of your key communication channels out of sync.

CONTENT STRATEGYThere is another major benefit to this approach as well. When we separate content from the display and platform our website runs on, all of a sudden our content itself becomes able to be talked about independently of our website and CMS itself.

For those that take content strategies seriously, this is a major benefit. It allows us to abstract out this content and treat it more equally with other types of content we are creating across all of our other channels.

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WHAT CHANGES IN AN AGILE METHOD OF WEB DESIGN?Despite both resulting in the end product being a website, a waterfall process and agile process cause several changes in the creation of a website design and development project. We’ll discuss the following aspects:

• Separation of content, display and platform• Process of evaluation and optimization• Clients and agencies must change• The RFP process

SEPARATION OF CONTENT, DISPLAY AND PLATFORMBy separating the display of content from the display and platform that the content is shown from, we can more easily make incremental changes to optimize a website.

Think of this in terms of the automobile that we’ve discussed in several different ways thus far. Despite the fact that cars are lasting longer and staying on the road longer than they ever have (up from 6.75 years in 1930 to 10.8 years today)38, they are often replaced every few years. These cars don’t actually stop working after three years, they just become obsolete in some other way. Maybe the owner doesn’t like how they look, maybe the audio connections aren’t compatible with their device of choice, or maybe the fuel consumption isn’t as efficient as it could be.

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Let’s now talk about this in terms of a website, and first make sure we all understand by each of these three terms:

Content

When we refer to content we are talking about the text and imagery on your website that are not tied solely to the interface (navigation, footers and common elements that appear the same on every page).

According to many, the first Web content management system dates back to 1995 when Vignette made “content management” synonymous with “web content management.” On a consumer front, Geocities, which started in 1994, was purchased by Yahoo! In 1999, and axed in 2009, provided content management of sorts though also suffered a bad reputation because of the amateurish appearance of many of its users pages.

Display

To continue the automobile analogy, think of the display as the look of your car. Although you used to think that giant spoiler on the trunk that made you look like a Formula One racer was appropriate,

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perhaps your recent promotion at work has made it clear that you need to tone things down a bit, especially when taking clients out to dinner. You’ve considered getting a new car altogether, that says “VP of Business Development,” not “Fast and Furious extra.”

If you could change the look of the outside of your car, while keeping everything else the same, and with minimal impact to your budget, would you do it?

An easy example of this for your website is the “printer-friendly” version of a page. Essentially, you are taking the extraneous portions of your web interface that are either not printable or irrelevant to someone who wishes to print your page content out and hiding it. In order to do this you need to be able to control the display of your interface and content and this requires them to be separate from one another.

A good, and slightly more modern example of this is responsive or adaptive design, which, for those of you unfamiliar with that term, is the way that a website will “respond” to the type of device or screen size it is being viewed on. By separating the content (text and images) of a page from the display (the width of the page, now dependent on the device it is being viewed on), you don’t either need to redesign your website each time a new smartphone with a revised screen size comes out, or create an alternate web experience for each screen size your site will be viewed on.

This separation gives you the freedom to adjust content as you see fit, and based on your marketing needs and what you’re able to tell from your analytics.

Platform

While not every website out there runs on a content management system (CMS), the vast majority of corporate and e-commerce sites run on some type of software that allows management of content through a database, development and deployment of features and functionality, and integration with other data sources and systems. Add to this the server (or servers) that displays page content and runs the CMS software, a customer relationship management (CRM) system used to hold customer data, and sometimes countless other integrated systems and you have an often large ecosystem.

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This is what we refer to as a platform. It’s not how the website looks, it’s not what it says or how it looks, it’s the underlying architecture and code that runs the site. How information is passed back and forth between systems, and how the system is managed and moderated.

Separating the platform from the other two items allows you to make changes to the systems you use, the software you support, all without worrying about having to start from scratch with the content and display of your website. This also means that you need to approach information architecture and systems integration in a way that is modular and adaptable.

Keep in mind, also, that with a more modular approach, you can make cost-based and operational decisions much more easily, such as switching out systems that aren’t performing well for lower cost ones, or even investments in larger systems that provide greater benefits. All of a sudden, these things become “smaller” decisions, because each of the pieces is less intertwined.

PROCESS OF EVALUATIONIt is impossible to be truly successful unless we can measure, analyze and optimize what we’re doing. An agile approach to your website doesn’t change this fact, but it does mean that your methods may need to be modified.

We need to implement a process of evaluation that is holistic and can also take advantage of the fact that we can evaluate content, display and platform independently. This means that a website isn’t simply “all good” or “all bad,” but instead may have different components that are performing better than others.

The chart below illustrates how this separation can help you ensure that each component is performing optimally by giving a few example criteria that are unique to each:

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Component Example Method(s) of Evaluation

Content Accuracy of contentRelevance of contentCompatibility with brand voice

Display Compatibility with organizational brand standardsDevice compatibilityCompatibility with standards

Platform Ease of use for administrationFeatures and functionalitySpeed and reliability of systems

Using the criteria above, as well as others that might be relevant to your organization, website and needs, you can start to see when it is time to make adjustments. There are also much more granular components to each. “Platform” can mean the content management system, the hosting platform, the CRM, analytics tool, or many other items. Ideally, all of these should be built to be interchangeable and modifiable if they cease to be effective.

I’d be surprised to hear that you don’t check your web analytics on a regular basis. While not everyone pays attention to it real-time, most organizations that use anything from the free Google Analytics to Adobe’s much more premium-priced analytics tools are monitoring their statistics at a weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis.

But let’s not confuse “monitoring” with “testing,” and let’s talk a little more about what testing really means. Simply monitoring your website doesn’t mean that a systematic system of testing and optimization has been employed.

The best way to approach this is to design a series of A/B tests that you continually use to improve focus areas of your site. You may choose certain pages or sections to optimize, or you may run several independent (but non-interfering) tests at a time if your site is larger.

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Using the scientific method helps us make the right decisions, and ensures that the changes we make are tied to the types of questions which are based on the need to achieve our true goals and objectives. This process, outlined in the chart below, is a recipe for continual improvement.

In this way, wholesale redesigns will give way to incremental and targeted improvements in an agile method. Think about Amazon.com, for instance, and the approach that they have taken to maintaining a consistent user experience and brand. Roger Dooley elaborates on this by saying:

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“Who’s the savviest marketer on the Web? My vote would go to Amazon.com, the biggest e-commerce firm by far. When was the last time Amazon launched a major website redesign? I have no idea, but their pages look to me about the same as they did five or ten years ago. Of course, they aren’t actually the same – many changes have occurred over the years.”

It’s interesting to think about things in this way. While Amazon has undoubtedly made countless changes and optimizations to its pages, processes, and other aspects, the overall impression is one of consistency, not of drastic change.

AGENCIES AND CLIENTS MUST CHANGEPerhaps the most important aspect of all that will help an agile approach to website improvements vs. the traditional website redesign process is a change in the industry itself. Website redesigns can be costly, so it stands to reason that a good number of agencies stand to make a handsome profit from continuing with the status quo. Only when both agencies and clients understand that there is clear benefit to shifting their mindset will this approach truly change.

Clients

Financially speaking, the investment in agile testing and improvements to a website shouldn’t be any less than they would be in a single website redesign. The benefits, however, are great. Instead of a brand new site every few years, the client benefits from continual improvements and optimization, and instead of the redesigns and improvements often happening in a “vacuum” or beta version of a site for months leading up to a launch, smaller, incremental updates are rolled out quickly, tested and modified with input from real people.

Agencies

The change in approach for clients means that investments in websites to agencies will be more spread out over time versus more concentrated in large projects that may only last 6-12 months and not be addressed again until another 24 months after that. This means a shift from the “project” model of one-time, lump sum contracts, back to a “retainer” model, where continuous

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adjustments and improvements mean that a relatively consistent amount of work is being performed over a 12-month period. While many things within the industry are moving away from the retainer model, this change will shift things back a little to this direction.

This shift will also benefit more strategic and analytics-based agencies more than those who are not as able to help their clients optimize in order to make the continual and incremental updates that the agile approach requires.

THE RFP PROCESSThere are many who are frustrated by the current and typical process of clients issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP). The argument in favor of them is that

In an agile world, the RFP process doesn’t need to stay or go per se, but the work outlined in one may change. For instance, because the separation of content, display and platform is more clearly understood and defined by all, it is a likely scenario that these may be approached independently with separate requests for proposal. It is also more likely that visual redesigns are approached incrementally and not wholesale.

This means that RFPs may be issued for just a re-platforming, or to rewrite content, or maybe just to make some interface enhancements, but that all three would no longer be included in a single request for proposal.

The other potential is for website agencies to receive a retainer to maintain everything in an effort to consolidate all the work, but still have an agile relationship that allows for continuous work and improvements over time.

NO MORE WHOLESALE REDESIGNSIt should be obvious now, but the last thing we’ll discuss as far as what changes in an agile web design and development method is the fact that a complete website overhaul ceases to happen. Instead, by separating the individual elements of content, display and platform, and taking a systematic approach to optimization of

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separate elements, a complete overhaul becomes unnecessary.

This means that consumers will have much more continuity in their experiences, and that brands will think on a much more evolutionary (versus revolutionary) as they roll out design and user experience enhancements throughout a website.

In this scenario, what happens to those wishing to stay current with design and UX trends? In the agile approach where content, display and platform are separated and independently adjustable, it’s even easier to make design changes that can be performed without requiring content changes. This allows independent decisions to be made that can keep your site growing and improving without the need for a wholesale redesign.

Next up, we’re going to talk about taking the very next step towards the agile web: your last website redesign. While much of the process might resemble a traditional process, there are several things to keep in mind as you approach it this one last time.

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YOUR LAST WEBSITE REDESIGN“The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.” Kent Beck; Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change; 2000

We’ve talked a bit about how an agile approach shifts our approach to how websites are designed and developed. Now your decision comes down to this: do you either ditch a redesign altogether in favor of an agile approach or make your next website redesign your last?

Let’s assume that your current site is in a place where a redesign is the only option. It could be that your content management system is outdated beyond repair, or that your content and design is in massive need of overhaul. Despite the fact that you need to redesign one last time, you can still make some changes to your approach that will benefit you in the long term.

HOW TO START YOUR LAST WEB REDESIGNWhat do you really need to get moving in the right direction to complete your organization’s last website redesign? Let’s discuss a few things that will put you on your way to your last website redesign, and make it a successful step towards an agile website.

START TESTING YOUR CURRENT SITEAs we discussed earlier, one of the major flaws with website redesigns is the “scrap everything” approach that assumes everything we are currently doing is wrong, and the only way forward is to burn it all to the ground and rebuild. While there are certainly cases where this is advisable, moving forward, you should be planning your website so that this is not necessary.

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This starts with testing your current site and analyzing what is currently working and not working. Even taking display aside, does something perform well even if it’s using the wrong blue from your brand guidelines? If so, understanding what works and what doesn’t is going to help you.

Start keeping a list of everything that both works and doesn’t work. Try to understand and see patterns so that you can see if small, subtle changes make a big difference. Then, start optimizing and testing those optimizations. Rather than making lots of large wholesale changes, start making small tweaks and measuring the effect they have on usage, engagement, traffic and conversions (as well as any other specific metrics to what you do).

All of a sudden, you will start finding patterns and ways to improve your site that are manageable and reasonable to perform. If you don’t have the bandwidth to do this, ask your digital agency to do this for 3 months instead of proposing a full redesign. You’ll be surprised what you can learn when you listen for smaller signals and how sometimes minor revisions have a great impact.

Look at the following on your page as items to test and optimize:

• Headline copy• Placement and subject matter of images• Calls to action in buttons• The type of “feedback” users get when they perform an action

Pay attention to the following metrics:

• Where did users come from before they came to the page?• Where did users go after they left your page?• What types of searches are they performing on your site? Are

there any specific words that you should be using that are frequently searched?

• If you can perform A/B tests using your current platform, learn as much as you can about photo, graphics, text and call to action preferences while you can.

Gather as much data as you can as you are planning your web redesign. This will help you make the best possible decisions during

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the planning phases for your new project. As you gather the data, also think about what you will want to be measuring on the new site in order to do the same type of reporting. On your new site, these measurements will also inform how you will continue to optimize the site after launch.

THINK ABOUT THE PLATFORMThe platform you invest in is probably going to be the biggest resource investment of the 3 components (content, display and platform) we’ve discussed. While the cost to use a platform varies anywhere from “free” (open source software) to hundreds of thousands a year and up. I put “free” in quotation marks to make sure we qualify that there actually is a cost to using any software, even that which is open source. Your platform isn’t just a CMS. It includes hosting, marketing tools (such as automation), in some cases analytics platforms, and many other things.

Talk to consultants that understand the end goal of what you are trying to achieve. Make sure you understand the trending best practices in terms of content management systems and other systems that you may need to use both immediately and in the future. You should also familiarize yourself with Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) which is published annually and shows the trends in the industry.

Think modularly as you plan out the system. Research content management system platforms to understand their benefits and limitations. For instance, deciding to use a completely custom-written, proprietary CMS, versus an open source one, versus a commercially-available requires thinking through many different factors and scenarios.

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Type of Content Management System

Open Source Commercially Licensed

Custom-Built

Benefits A developer commu-nity actively supports the platform, and on the more popular CMS platforms, there are countless contributors and a high likelihood that someone else has run into the same issue already. Often (but not always) consul-tants and developers are easier to find and cheaper to hire.

The product road-map is often more focused than an open source one.There is a company that is claiming accountability for any issues with the product.

It is lightweight in the sense that it can be completely customized to only what is needed.

Drawbacks Despite having a large developer commu-nity, not all of their posted solutions are rock-solid.

Often costs to maintain open source systems with security updates and system updates are underestimated, and can in some cases be comparable to com-mercial licensing fees.

Cost can be pro-hibitive for licens-ing commercial systems, though in many cases, they are unfairly com-pared to the “free” costs of both open source and custom systems.

The product road-map, as well as any updates or im-provements to the system are depen-dent on a company with shareholders, customers (who in many cases may be squeakier wheels than you) who may make other requests.

Custom-built sys-tems are generally more difficult to maintain since they are the product of a single developer or firm.

In many cases, custom-built systems have the drawback of a lack of “legacy” and past trouble-shooting, or even modifications of UX based on user feedback.

In addition to a content management system, there are most likely several other systems that send information to, receive information from, or both, that will need to be factored into any decisions you make. These may include a customer relationship management (CRM) system, web analytics, email marketing platform, applicant tracking systems, and many more.

While what we are proposing in an agile web process does not change the need to integrate with other systems, but it does call

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for an increased usage of systems which can interact with third parties via common, well-established methods and protocols. This could be something like allowing single sign on, passing data in application forms, pulling customer purchase preferences based on their ordering preferences, displaying data feeds or any number of potential integrations.

The platform you choose will have a huge influence on how agile your site can be. Understanding the full impact of the different applications you utilize and how they all contribute to the strength of your platform will help you with this work.

ONE “LAST” REDESIGNRemember the Amazon.com example I mentioned earlier? While there hasn’t been a drastic redesign, plenty has changed. Amazon is constantly testing and optimizing its pages, but it’s been a very long time since there was a massive change that happened all at once.

Your organization’s website may vary drastically from Amazon’s, however. In this case, it may very well be that you need to do one last redesign to make sure your site is set up for a successful agile approach moving forward. Before you set out to do this, make sure it’s necessary. It may very well be that you don’t need to scrap everything.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your website CMS support the separation of content, display and platform, as we discussed previously?

• How far “off” is the design and content compared to your current product and service offerings and your overall brand?

• Do you know how well your site is performing and why?• Have you been making continual improvements and updates

since your website last launched?

If you feel very comfortable about the issues listed above, you may already be in good shape. If there are major issues with your site, it’s time to get started on your last redesign.

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CHANGE YOUR THINKINGIt also starts with a shift in the thought process an organization has when solving issues, and specifically about how you treat your website.

For instance, in many of the organizations I speak with about their websites, there is a general attitude that falls into one of the following categories:

1. The website is so out of date we don’t even look at it anymore2. (Similar to the last, but slightly different) The website doesn’t

have the right place for our most recent initiative, so we just made a separate microsite for it. All our salespeople are pushing people there instead.

3. The last person in my position was responsible for the site, and we’ve moved in a different direction since then

4. The agency we hired did a terrible job and we haven’t been able to fix it because of our budget

What’s wrong with these types of thinking? First, by believing that the problems with your website are siloed or relegated to one person or department’s responsibility, or the sole fault of an outside consultant or agency, you’re not accepting that it takes a team to create these things.

Second, failing to use the site or find ways to modify it are only exacerbating the issue that it doesn’t fit your current needs. Creating a separate website for products or services that don’t “fit” on your current site doesn’t work on several levels, including lack of cohesion with what you are saying on your primary domain, lack of integration with your Search Engine Optimization strategy, and a general dissonance with your brand. Like it or not, your organization’s primary website is where people go to look for information first. If they don’t find it there, they may or may not keep searching or follow a link to a separate website.

CHANGE YOUR BUDGETING There is also another very practical reason that organizations only

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redesign their website every 3-5 years: there simply isn’t enough budget to do so every 12 months, let alone on a more frequent basis. They also often underestimate the cost needed to successfully maintain and improve the site in between redesigns.

Successful organizations know that even if they plan a major redesign every three years, their website still needs to receive plenty of TLC in the interim, so they budget accordingly with a “maintenance” budget on the years in between website overhauls. But even this approach still leads us to outdated sites that require major redesigns in order to be current.

This is where a change in thinking is needed. Looking at the chart above, if you spread the budget for both your redesign and subsequent upkeep evenly year over year, what could you do differently? For starters, you could make more substantial changes to your site on a continual or rolling basis. This means that it is conceivable you already have the budget to implement this change in approach.

As you can see in our example budget, the same money (a total of $800,000) is being spent over a 3-year period, though in an agile approach, the money is evenly distributed over time. This means

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more continual improvement instead of the bare minimum needed to keep the website running properly.

CHANGE YOUR EVALUATION METHODSAn agile web approach means that you won’t ever stop adjusting things. This means that you will be adopting a process of continual testing, analysis, and optimization. At the heart of it, evaluation and optimization are what should be constantly driving the changes you will be enacting on your website.

Take a look at the diagram below to see what we’re talking about:

Despite all this change and testing that we will be doing, always make sure to be “scientific” in your approach. For instance, the following are a few things to remember:

• Start with a question whose answer will help you get better information about one of your key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Make sure that you don’t have more than one item you are testing for in any experiment

• Make sure you understand what results will help answer your question

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• Make sure that your analysis contains next steps; it could be a further test, or it could be a conclusion that results in a change

• Don’t forget that content, display and platform all have to be continually optimized and maintained; you can be testing across all three simultaneously if your tests are properly constructed

Following these items will help you ensure your measurement and optimization is helping to drive the evolution of your site.

TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS A change in evaluation should also mean that you are finding ways to get more direct feedback from the users of your site, including your customers. Whether this takes the shape of automated surveys on your site, conversations on social media, or it could involve a lot more direct interaction with your target audiences. No matter how you approach it, you need to stay in closer touch with what they want, what they are looking for, and how they rate the experience they have on your site.

As part of your redesign process, you should talk with your customers and learn what they both like and dislike. You may find that they actually like a feature that your website redesign committee doesn’t regard as important.

Having this conversation with your key audiences will help humanize the potentially major change that your website is about to undergo.

CONCLUSIONAs you can see, moving to an agile web approach will take some changes in your thinking, your budgeting, your evaluation of success, and even the way you interact with your customers. The benefits, however, will show themselves over time.

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THE AGILE WEB FOR AGENCIES“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”Winston Churchill

Now we’re going to take a brief look at what this means for web agencies. Most of what we’re going to be talking about here is similar to the previous chapter, though approached from the perspective of an agency.

If you are “client-side,” you may even feel the desire to skip over some of these points as if they don’t apply. But since you’ll most likely be hiring a web agency to help you with your website needs, I highly recommend you keep reading.

CHANGE YOUR BUDGETINGOne of the biggest impact that this approach has is that it transforms companies whose primary (or at least a major) revenue stream is from large web design and development work from a more project-based revenue model, to a recurring revenue model.

I am slightly reluctant to proclaim this the big “return of the retainer,” because we currently live in a world where the r-word (retainer) is out of favor with clients, and a more project-based approach is in fashion. While there’s not enough room in this book to dive into that topic with the appropriate amount of depth, I will say that the agile approach in general lends itself to a retainer model better than a fixed project amount. Many clients may not want to call it a retainer, but from an agency perspective, it may look an awful lot like one.

This type of change isn’t good or bad per se, but immediately losing the revenue from large website projects may have an impact on your operating budget if you don’t plan accordingly.

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CHANGE YOUR THINKING AND EVALUATIONIt definitely takes a shift in mindset to change from a waterfall approach to an agile one. The freedom to make smaller, incremental changes means that you will do brainstorming, analysis of data, evaluation and recommendations more often. While clients benefit from this because you can succeed faster (I prefer this to fail faster, so I’ll use it here like that!), it also means that, as an agency working on multiple projects for multiple clients, you are going to do a few things:

• Your learning will be off the charts (in a good way) because you will be constantly changing and optimizing for many clients at the same time.

• You will be multitasking a lot more. With smaller incremental changes, some smaller budget, thus you need to do more work for a more diverse set of clients in order to make the same revenue. While this isn’t for everyone, for the right team it means no one will ever get bored!

• You will need to build in many more ways to measure and evaluate and constantly be thinking about how to get data in both the best and the quickest way possible. No more letting something go for a few months and checking back. Agile methods necessitate as near-instant feedback as possible.

YOUR CLIENTS’ LAST REDESIGNAs I said earlier, some organizations are simply going to have to do a full-scale redesign before they can implement an agile approach to improving their site. This is an opportunity for many agencies to hybridize their revenue model (some project-based, some recurring revenue-based) for a time until they may make a shift from doing more project work to doing more recurring work.

When you approach your next client website redesign as their last, you will also need to educate them on what this means. In many cases, their organization will be set up to regularly redo their site, or in other cases, there may not even be that much structure in place.

This is a fundamental change to the way organizations work, and

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it may be a conversation and change that extends beyond the domain of even CMOs and CTO/CIOs. A major change to the way an organization creates budgets and staffs for ongoing projects is going to involve others (CFOs, COOs) as well. Keep this in mind when you begin to talk about this with your clients.

BENEFITS OF THE MOVE TOWARDS AGILESo how will your agency benefit from this shift from a waterfall mindset to an agile one? There are actually quite a few. I’ll share some briefly here:

• You are in more constant communication with your clients, which can help you build a better, stronger relationship with them.

• You have the opportunity to be proactive and provide solutions to problems, instead of either tied to requirements (if you’re midway through a project), or simply reactive to issues (if the project has launched and there’s a small maintenance budget). In other words, you get to be heroes every day by bringing great ideas that can be implemented during the next sprint.

• You have a regular, recurring revenue stream instead of large spikes in revenue from projects. This helps you manage resources better, causes you to have less waiting time in between projects, and also minimizes the amount of multiple, concurrent huge deliverables you have for projects which are “stacked” on each other from a timing perspective.

• You will have happier clients, who see better, quicker results. CWS, a web agency, claims that by taking a similar approach on their own agency website, they’ve seen a 28% increase in revenue39. Think about what that means when you apply that to your customers as well.

As you can see, once you can get over the hurdle, both by changing internally, as well as convincing your clients to change, you will begin to reap benefits.

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CONCLUSIONWhile it may not be without its share of challenges, moving your agency to a more agile methodology and mindset when working on your clients’ website projects will have great benefits that are tangible from the perspective of the results you will get from your work, the relationships you can build with your clients, and the revenue model that favors a continuous stream of work from your clients.

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AN ALTERNATIVE: THE HYBRID MODEL

“You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it’s moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks’ efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.”Gil Scott-Heron

If you work at (or own) an agency, you may have invested countless hours in a waterfall process of website design and development. All of the documentation, training, and even the way your billing is structured for web redesigns may be centered around your current way of doing things.

One thing that can help either ease your company into a more agile method, or even help you test the waters towards changing your approach is to adopt a more hybrid model of design and development. While there are many different interpretations of “hybrid” out there, here’s one potential example: A before and after that still keeps the more rigid waterfall-style steps in the process, but encourages more of an agile approach within each step.

Hybrid Waterfall/Agile ExampleBefore (Waterfall Method) After (Agile Method)

Discovery:Set of 3 meetings

DiscoveryNot much changes here

Specification• Wireframes/requirements are created• Wireframes/requirements are revised• Wireframes/requirements are final-

ized

Specification• Small set of wireframes/requirements

are created for a few key pages• Initial small set is revised and a few

more are added• Second set is revised and the final

ones are added• Full set is finalized

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Design• Designs are created• Designs are revised• Designs are finalized

Design• Small set of wireframes/requirements

are created for a few key pages• Initial small set is revised and a few

more are added• Second small set is revised and a few

more are added• Third set is revised and the final ones

are added• Full set is finalized

Implementation• HTML/CSS work is completed• CMS Integration setup• Feature development• Beta launch

Implementation• HTML/CSS work is completed• CMS Integration setup• Initial feature set is developed and

evaluated• Second feature set developed and

evaluated• Third feature set developed and

evaluated• Final feature set is developed and

evaluated• Beta launch

As you can see above, the main difference between the two is in the fact that smaller batches of work are performed with more steps in between.

WHAT DOES ADDING MORE STEPS TO YOUR REDESIGN PROCESS REALLY MEAN?

So what about time and cost? This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to spend more time and/or money on website redesign projects. Within reason, a few smaller increments more in your process will actually eliminate the following:

Having to go back and make tiny changes on several files. You’re working with a smaller set of files or documents in early stages using the agile/hybrid method, so all of that redundant work you may find yourself doing during the design phase (e.g. when the client says, “can you make that green a little greener?” when you are 90% done with page design) is lessened since you are making more frequent decisions. In other words, changing the green color in your Photoshop or Sketch files can take a lot less time when there are 3 to change early on in the process versus 25 to change at the end.

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Going too far down a path with a decision without having the chance to think it through or work more collaboratively. In short, you’re able to fail faster and get to the best design (both technical and graphic) decisions quicker. Because there are more iterations in the process, you can make smaller adjustments that take less time to do, because as we discussed in the point above, you’re making the big changes earlier on to fewer sets of files.

If you’re an agency, what about your clients? If you find it hard already to get time on your clients’ calendars to the meetings you do have, it may sound like a greater challenge to have an even greater set of meetings due to an increased amount of steps involved. Also, many clients hire agencies to perform their website redesigns because they don’t have the bandwidth to spend all of the time themselves. All of a sudden you (as an agency) are asking your clients to spend a lot more time than they may have anticipated.

In some cases, this may mean that your clients won’t necessarily participate in some of the incremental steps in the process, even if your internal agency team does. While this might not always be optimal, it can definitely still breed good results. It helps when someone internally can play the surrogate “product owner” role, especially when they have a deep knowledge of the client and their goals.

CONCLUSIONTrying a hybrid waterfall-agile approach just might be the way for your to dip your toes in the water and see if the agile web approach makes sense for you. If it does work, you now have the tools and methods to try taking it a step further towards a more agile method.

Also, remember that once your website is redesigned, it’s actually quite simple to immediately adopt an agile web methodology. You may choose to complete the initial project using a more traditional waterfall method, but be planning ahead to switch to an agile process immediately upon launch.

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NEXT STEPS“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”- Walt Disney

By tracing the history of software development back to the beginning, you can see how the methods and processes we often take for granted were formed, and why they were created in the first place. The effort involved in developing early software systems meant that all planning needed to be done well in advance. Since then, we from evolved from paper punch cards to early PCs, to an always-connected, big data, software as a service, cloud-based world. Our ability to receive instant feedback and make incremental, yet wide-reaching updates to our marketing channels has increased so dramatically (and will continue to increase) that the old methods of and methodology of “measure twice, cut once,” no longer satisfies our needs for increased ROI.

While the agile concept is certainly not new at this point in our history, applying it to the design and development of websites is still somewhat uncharted territory for many. The traditional website redesign is sometimes necessary for reasons we discussed, but many times a more iterative, evolutionary and agile approach is a smarter choice for your customers, your organization, as well as your agency and clients (if you’re a web agency).

This means the end of the website redesign as we know it. No more clean slate drawing board, but instead a continual state of listening, evaluating and optimizing. No more dramatic site launches, but instead a more consistent Web presence that helps provide continuity for customers, your other marketing efforts, and even internal staff. No more large website design and development projects for agencies, but instead a retainer-style model that supports a continual series of improvements and optimizations.

In order to change the “scrap everything and start over” mentality that is pervasive in the industry, it will take a change in the mindsets of everyone involved in the process. This includes marketers, CFOs, agencies, software vendors, and many others. Fortunately, there are

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a lot of supporters of an agile approach to marketing, and because your website is one of your key marketing channels, it’s time to start taking this approach.

While this doesn’t necessarily mean you can scrap that website redesign project you are in the midst of planning, it does mean that the next site you launch has the opportunity to stay optimized and not need to be redesigned from scratch. If you plan to take an agile approach once your new site launches, you can make sure you don’t find yourself in the same position you may currently find yourself in, with a website that doesn’t fit your needs after making such a large investment in it many months ago.

It will be a new approach for most in some ways, but as marketing becomes an increasingly agile practice, this is both a natural progression and one that is in keeping with the evolution from a process of programming via punch cards, to a continually measured, analyzed, and optimized method.

In the end, my hope is that this will provide better experiences for customers through a more consistent interaction, and more effective results for marketers who have been jumping from website redesign to website redesign with often inconsistent results. I wish you the best in your website marketing efforts, and hope that these thoughts were helpful as you continue your work.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSIt can be tempting to think that one can teach themselves everything they know. In reality, however, there is nothing one can claim as solely their own, and no idea that isn’t built with the help of ideas which preceded it. I am consistently humbled by the education I’ve received by so many great people.

I have had countless teachers and co-conspirators over the years, and I thank every single one of them for helping me arrive at the conclusions and ideas I’ve presented in the preceding pages.

I also want to thank the team at Carousel30 for continuing to ask question and pursue excellence with everything they do. Their dedication to doing things better every time is a constant inspiration to me.

Finally, I’d like to thank my wife Lindsey for understanding the importance of creating things, even if they sometimes get created on nights, weekends, and once in a while on vacations.

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2, 2011).

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Survey.” Forbes. April 15, 2014.

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In Pivoting, Chaotic, And Stable Market Phases.” Forrester Research. November 14,

2014.

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24 Google. “The Shift to Constant Connectivity.” retrieved July 2, 2016.

25 Berger, Jonah. “How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely

Blackout Ad on Twitter.” Wired. June 2013.

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Something More Lasting.” Fast Company. June 20, 2013.

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Connected Things Coming.“ June 1, 2016. Media Post.

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Review. January 21, 2015.30 Irwin, Tanya (January 21, 2008). “OfficeMax Out Elfs Itself: A Case Study In Viral Marketing”. MediaPost. 31 Fine, Jon (January 29, 2009). “OfficeMax’s Wacky Marketing Strategy”. Business Week. 32 Brinker, Scott. “Have You Adopted Agile Marketing Yet?” Search Engine Land. July 11, 2012.33 Carr, Austin. “Digg Redesigns, Loses More Than a Quarter of Audience.” Fast Company. September 23, 2010.34 Ivanoff, Ava. “3 Painfully Public Site Redesign Disasters.” Sitepoint. January 7, 2015.35 Spool, Jared. “Extraordinarily Radical Redesign Strategies” March 20, 2013. UIE Blog.36 Spool, Jared. “The $300 Million Button.” User Interface Engineering.37 Source: Kathryn McDonnell, “Where did the Marks & Spencer website relaunch go wrong?” Econsultancy blog, August 25, 2014.38 Gorzelany, Jim. “Cars That Can Last For 250,000 Miles (Or More)” Forbes. March 14, 2013

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ABOUT GREG KIHLSTRÖM“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

Greg is the Founder and CEO of Carousel30 and has worked with top brands on a number of campaigns, including AOL, AARP, Ben & Jerry’s, Geico Direct, MTV, Starbucks, The Nature Conservancy, Toyota, TV One and Washington Wizards. He has received numerous awards and honors from the Webby Awards, ADDYs, American Marketing Association, iMedia’s Digital Agency Awards, Summit Creative Awards among others. His work has been published in books by Rockport Publishers and Crescent Hill Books and industry-related magazines such as Communication Arts and Graphics. He has been featured in and interviewed by several prominent news outlets and publications such as Advertising Age, The Kojo Nnamdi Show, SmartCEO, Website Magazine, Web Designer Magazine, Bisnow, The Washington Times and The Washington Post.

Greg has participated as a judge in renowned design competitions around the country. He frequently speaks at industry events on a global basis and has served as keynote, presenter and participant in panel discussions at such events as Internet Week New York, Internet Summit, SMX Social Media, Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, Digital Capital Week, EventTech and DMAW’s Digital Day. He has written several white papers on industry topics and has written articles for Target Market Magazine, Website Magazine, Capitol Communicator, and is a regular contributing writer to Washington Business Journal, Search Engine Watch, and iMedia Connection, a leading online publication for the digital marketing community.

He is has served on the Board of Directors of the American Advertising Federation, AAF DC, AIGA DC, the Trust for the National Mall’s National Advisory Committee, and currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Trust for the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

In addition, Greg frequently helps young professionals in the advertising industry with career development, by serving as a mentor to young advertising and marketing professionals, and speaking to classes at colleges and universities such as Georgetown University, American University, Virginia Tech and Westwood College.

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/gregkihlstromLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom

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THE AGILE WEBA Challenge to Re-examine the Methods and Processes

Used to Plan, Enhance and Optimize Websites

by Greg Kihlström

THE A

GILE W

EB | GREG

KIHLSTRÖ

M

By tracing the history of software development back to its beginning, this book forces a re-examination of the website design, development and optimization approach that many organizations take for granted.

Building upon agile software development and agile marketing practices that are still evolving, author and agency founder Greg Kihlström walks the reader through new ways to look at the way we treat websites, and plan for their redesign and optimization. The life of a website becomes a marathon with incremental improvements over time, instead of a sprint that ends when a new website is created to replace the previous one.

Kihlström builds on his experience designing and marketing interactive experiences for top brands, and running an agency since the early 2000s and provides a unique vision for how marketers can create websites that continue to grow in sophistication and effectiveness over time without the need for a continual process of redesigns.

This book is aimed at the marketer who wants to create the most ef-fective website possible, and is willing to take a fresh look at how they approach their organization’s online presence.