Posts tagged "agile"
Common Website Mistakes 11: Lack of Business Value
In agile development, your output should be business value. Here are a few rules and guidelines that you can use to ensure you are keeping on an agile path.
Common Website Mistakes 10: Search as a Marketing Tool
Search functionality is a requirement in most of today's website projects. It helps new visitors navigate your content without having to understand the information architecture of your website. And even if they do, it does not harm to provide a convenient way to access information that might be buried deep somewhere in your site structure. Long story short: everyone typically agrees that you need a search.
Common Website Mistakes 9: SEO Over Everything
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a common demand in most of today's online marketing projects. There is a whole industry around optimizing your website for search engines (mainly Google and Baidu) and companies invest lots of money into it. But should you really focus that much on SEO?
Common Website Mistakes 7: "Developing" agile
Time and time again I see companies that "develop agile", meaning the development teams use one of the agile frameworks to develop projects that are fixed-time, fixed-cost and fixed-scope. In this article, I will explain why this is not agile and how you can steer your organization to become truly agile
Common Website Mistakes 8: Battle for the Home Page
The home page is the most important and most central point in all websites. This is often the first touch point every potential customer, candidate, and investor will have with your company or service, so its importance cannot be overestimated. Let us take a look at some common suggestions for what should be here.
Common Website Mistakes 6: Misconceptions in the Development Cycle
In web development, most companies have a adapted an agile approach. Since such an approach requires feedback loops of inspection and adaption, the IT departments have set up multiple environments to support the agile delivery process. There is often a lot of confusion about these stages, so I want to describe what they are for.
Common Website Mistakes 5: Manual Testing
In pretty much all projects I have been involved in, testing has made up for a significant amount of the overall effort. The vast majority of the tests were conducted manually and some broken features always made it to production. It is worth mentioning that this happened independent of the methodology, so even waterfall projects do not save you from these issues.
Common Website Mistakes 4: Rejecting Feedback
Many people think that rejecting feedback is a deliberate act, while most of the time it is a result of passivity. I believe that the majority of rejection is subtle and comes into play even before collecting feedback, e.g. by not even providing means to do so. The result of this is a multitude of different justifications why feedback is undesirable right now. Here are a few arguments that I have heard again and again in my career.
Common Website Mistakes 3: Mixing Content and Presentation
After two culture-related articles, I want to dive into a more practical mistake: Mixing content and presentation.
Common Website Mistakes 2: Bike-shedding
In the second part of my series I want to focus on another typical culture-related mistake for websites: Bike-shedding.
Common Website Mistakes 1: Printing Culture
In my 15 years of supporting websites for all types of customers I have seen a lot of mistakes that people make. I want to point out the most common issues I have experienced and how you can mitigate them.