Today websites are no longer nice-to-have pieces of brochureware. Whether your business is in the cloud, or has a brick-and-mortar component, your web presence is essential to your selling process and business success. This is true for businesses of any size. Your one- or x-person team that maintains and updates your website is trusted with the keys to one of the engines that power your business. The magic your web team does on a daily basis might or might not be fully apparent to you, but you certainly expect results.

Stop for a second and ask yourself whether your web team is set up for success. Does the framework they work in support efficiency and quality?

1. Coherent on-boarding, continuous training, updated and complete documentation

For web teams of any size, you want to optimize ramp-up time for new team members, and maintain a coherent and transparent level of skills and knowledge within the team. If you have a one-person web team, what will keep you up at night is how to mitigate the potential loss of institutional and functional knowledge when that person leaves your company. In both cases it is imperative that there is clear, accessible, updated, and streamlined documentation. Even though it is often an afterthought and rarely a priority, good documentation can be a life- and money-saver. In addition, have a training budget and encourage your web team to use it. Set up regular cross-training sessions for your team to share knowledge, skills, and experience.

2. State-of-the-art web technology

Maybe you have a Marketing Technology team, maybe you don’t. The key is to keep investing into the technology that runs your website. A robust, modern, and scalable content management platform will deliver high ROI and customer confidence. State-of-the-art tools can, on the one hand, provide invaluable insights into analytics, and user behavior/journey, while, on the other, help automate and streamline processes, and raise efficiencies.

3. Useful and adopted web processes based on best practices

What is your web team’s strategy for areas like governance, workflow, UX, SEO, form optimization, prototyping, file naming convention, and lead generation and routing? The extent and detail of that strategy may depend on the size of the team, website and business, yet even a small website needs to follow strategic guidelines, the importance of which grow exponentially with bigger websites and teams.

4. Quality Control

You might not have a QA/QC team, but no matter how big your organization is, a clear process for pre-launch and after-launch testing and validation of web updates is essential for maintaining a high quality website. Spelling mistakes, dead or wrong links, and formatting errors can impact user trust and confidence in not only your website but also your business. Glitches and errors are unavoidable, but a well-defined process will go a long way in minimizing consistency and quality issues.

5. Company culture

Here at Salesforce we thrive in, and keep building, a unique culture expressed in what we call the Aloha Spirit of trust, integrity, character, respect and compassion. Teams, and people, are more productive, more efficient, and happier if the atmosphere they work in is inclusive, empowering, fair, and fun.

Your organization will already have some or all of these aspects in place to some degree. But the results of optimizing each aspect further will be felt by your business long-term.

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