Today, everyone needs a professionally looking and 100% functional website if they want to be found online and convert. After all, your business´ website is often the first point of contact your visitors have with your brand, so their next decisions will be heavily influenced by what they see during the first few seconds they enter your website.
So, you basically need an expertly designed website, especially if you are using an eCommerce platform such as BigCommerce. They do offer some cute pre-made cookie-cutter templates and themes. However, if you want your website to look and feel like a professional business channel, you will certainly need the help of a BigCommerce developer.
Now, you also need to avoid the common problems that plague the development stage of your project and might potentially drive your project down to a ditch before it even takes off. Let´s g over some of them:
Obscure Success Metrics
Concreteness is a virtue every business owner and project manager should cultivate. Countless ideas sound great on paper but are terrible in practice. This happens because we are not clear about what they are supposed to achieve or how.
For example, we are almost certain that we need to increase the volume of visitors to our website. However, there can be many reasons a person enters a website. They might want to contact us for questions, try to download a manual, subscribe to a newsletter, or just buy products. Deciding the kind of interaction we want them to have with our website will determine our level of success. Moreover, it will prevent our different departments from designing elements that don’t fit well together. This takes us to the next point.
Scope Creep
Contrary to what many think, this is not a problem that only affects BigCommerce developers. This problem will attack project managers, content producers, and even business owners and, if left unchecked, can become a huge snowball able to derail any project no matter how awesome it is.
To avoid this problem, take your planning stage very seriously. Break all your work down into small achievable goals, and then run it by your team. If they have any new ideas on how to improve the project, evaluate how these changes fit into your project goals. Quickly identify the ideas that sound incredible but can potentially alter the project and the rest of your goals, and ponder if they should be implemented right away, or can wait until after the rest of the project is completed. After you have done all this, you can start executing the plan and make sure you stick to it.
You need to realize that you and your team will constantly come up with great ideas as the project progresses. However, if you don’t keep them under control, they will inevitably make your project spiral out of control.
Poor Communication
After we have our plan going, many teams are tempted to lock themselves until they finish their part of the project. This creates other kinds of problems, especially when two sections of a project need to be integrated. If two different teams are working separately, they usually end up with products so divergent, they need to be reworked from scratch. So, keeping your communication lines open and creating feedback timelines will ensure that your teams do not stray away from each other too much.
Wrong Talent
This one sounds like an obvious problem with an obvious solution. Do you want things done efficiently? Just hire the experts. Right?
However, being an expert means knowing how to solve very specific problems. Given the many ways every business differs from each other, finding an expert team that has worked in your specific industry and managed to solve your specific problems, is extremely hard.
Fortunately, there are eCommerce agencies with several teams under their roof that specialize in creating efficient websites that rank and convert. 1DigitalⓇ Agency has a team of expert BigCommerce developers that have worked in almost any industry under the sun. From gardening to fashion, to gaming. They have study cases covering their most successful projects. Visit them today and find out more about their services.
