A kickoff meeting is the genesis of any new website project at WebsiteDoctor, and it’s usually an inspiring and creative event.

We gain an amazing understanding of your business and team dynamics, and leave the meeting ready to explore all kinds of creative solutions. You get to dive deeply into your own organization’s needs and desires, problems and successes. We all get to know each other, get familiar with the process in front of us, and get to build a shared vision.

How it works!

Time

Normally we’ll need 90 minutes to 2 hours for a project that’s not too complex. More if the project is fairly complex. Our goal is to dig as deeply into your organisation and objectives as possible, so we’ve got some great questions prepared.

Attendees

The attendees should represent all of the voices necessary, but be small enough that true conversations can happen and stay relevant. Anyone who will be involved in final sign-off on milestones must be there. The web design process is a collaborative effort – from kickoff through to launch – will require some of your time and talents, too.

Great preparation

There are several things we like to look at before the kickoff meeting.

• Analytics. These help us understand how visitors are using your existing website, what content they find important (which is often different than the content you find important), and how we’ll approach SEO.
• Survey/Research. Any survey or research data you have, quantitative and qualitative information about your customers, users, industry, etc.
• Competitive analysis. We’ll review your industry, your competitors and your peers.
• Design inspiration. We’d like you to select a few sites that you really like, and during our meeting we’ll discuss what’s drawing you to those sites and why (or why not) a similar approach might be right for your project.

Meeting agenda

We like to prepare the agenda a few days in advance and share it with your team so that you all know what to expect. Depending on the project and what we know or don’t already, the agenda looks something like this (but is not set in stone):

Introductions and familiarisation

We will get to know each other, and discuss how we prefer to communicate.

Information gathering

Open discussion about the different features and requirements that you and your staff would like to have in the new website, as well as discussing how to integrate your workflows with the new website.

This will cover:

• Project Goals & High Level Overview List and review all goals for this project, such as clearer communication, responsive design, increased conversions, improved SEO, improved scalability, etc.
• Business objectives What does your organisation wish to achieve from this project? This list of objectives will need prioritising so that they can be used to inform the decision making process.
• Target Market The client should describe their target market including: gender, age, location, and profile.
• Calls to action Once we have our success criteria, they need to have associated calls to action. These are the things that we want users to actively do in order to measure success.

Design discussion

Design tends to be a subjective issue, so it’s important that we discuss it early on. We will discuss different elements and examples of design that could inspire the project, as well as the personality that we want the design to project.

• Competitor Review: Review key competitor websites.
• Current Site Review: Walkthrough of current website, note issues and change requests
• New Site Design: Design

For example, should it be young and trendy or older and conservative? Another question we will ask with regard to design and language tone is “If your business was a famous person who would it be?”

This can be useful when writing text content, as well as for the overall vision or design aesthetic.

Content and SEO

Discussion of site content (text, photography, illustrations, video) and who will supply what parts. We will briefly discuss SEO keyword research, landing pages and content marketing strategy post-launch.

Risks and Tradeoffs:

We try to lead a very frank discussion about what we see as inhibiting our project success, what elements of the project might prove troublesome or difficult, and how we’ll approach problems when they arise.

Project timeline

Dates and Milestones: At this point, our project plan is pretty loose, but we try to give you an idea of when to expect things from us, and when we need things from you.

Questions

Any final questions before concluding meeting?

Next steps

What are the immediate next steps after the kick-off meeting

Conclusion

Download a printable copy of the agenda

You can download a printable copy of the agenda here: Kick-off Meeting Agenda (PDF)

An open mind

Let go of your biases and think about your organization in the abstract. Be open to approaching your workflows and messaging in new and different ways. Think less about your competitors and more about your own future. Be open, be honest, and be pumped! We’re going to build something great together!