Manpower planning is about finding the right people who can deliver the right outcome for the web design packages you offer. You need to make sure that youre ready when projects come in. Start with the basics. Let’s talk about arranging a team for a custom wordpress site. To get a better picture, here’s the scenario:
“A career coach wants to hire you to redesign his informative 5 pages website. He wants the same content but wants it to have a completely unique, custom design. The client already has a plan on how the site would look. He wants the features to be based on a sound/music website.”
How do you assemble a team to build this simple WP site?
Account Manager
The account manager serves as the front desk of the company and is in charge of discussing web design packages to the clients. You need someone who not only has good customer service skills, but also an understanding of the technical side of the WordPress CMS and web design best practices. Interpersonal skills are useful, because the account manager should understand what your clients need and how to best deliver that based on your company’s capabilities.
Any web design company can make a 5-page WordPress site. Your account manager should therefore be able to let the client know that your company is the right choice to work on their website. How? By letting them know you can work around their budget. For example, your account manager can suggest using ready-made templates to save on time and money. Conversely, a good account manager should also be able to let the client know when a custom-made template would suit their needs better. Most of the time, a busy professional, like a career coach is too busy dealing with their own clients, so they would prefer an efficient approach to their website development.
Project Manager
When it comes to your project manager, you need to choose someone you can trust in delegating tasks. This person will act as your team’s messenger and will relay project details and progress to your account manager. It’s a demanding job — handling the team and making sure every member is on schedule with their respective tasks. You need someone organized, systematic and a problem solver. Aside from dealing with and analyzing clients’ web design goals, the project manager should know how to provide options to meet client demands. Proficiency with the use of project management software and collaborative tools is important and knowledge of the technical side of the web development process is definitely an advantage.
Web Designer / Front End Developer
Once the project manager and account manager have finalized the preferred website design scheme — ready-made versus custom-made template — it is the web designer’s task to execute it.
For a custom-made template, the web designer will first create a mock-up of how the site will look, based on the design ideas from the client. Hopefully the client will approve it right away. Sometimes this takes a couple rounds of feedback. It’s important to work in a graphics tool here like Photoshop rather than getting into coding at this point. It’s very easy to make changes in Photoshop – but changing a template around takes more work. Minor changes might be made to the original blueprint to accommodate web design standards as well as to make the site mobile-friendly. Once the client approves the design, the web designer will then prepare the template.
Alternatively, the web designer can also work on ready-made templates instead and just customize it according to the client’s specifications. It may be something simple as changing font styles and color schemes or involve more complex changes like image or video galleries or animations.
You need to hire someone who is proficient in using different front-end developer tools like, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Several years of experience is typical of a qualified designer. Find someone who knows about current trends and industry standards, particularly in the area of mobile-responsiveness.
If your designer can work on the site for 8 hours a day, then a 5-page custom design can be done within 2-3 days. Once finished, work can be passed on to the next member of the team.
Web Developer
A web developer is also known as an application developer or back-end developer. This person is in charge of the website’s functionality. When you shop for WordPress developers, make sure to check their portfolio and make an assessment. Consider someone with 2-3 years experience using PHP, the programming language that WordPress is coded in. You also need someone who has a good understanding of the WordPress CMS architecture. WordPress has a special way that features should be developed. Anyone who will be doing custom development inside of WordPress should have clear concepts in how things like hooks, plugins, and widgets should be developed.
At this stage of the project, the web developer should be able to make the site fully functional — from navigation to form submissions and even up to more advanced features like video and/or sound streaming. This process should take 2-3 days and then it can be ready for QA.
Content Writer
A content writer might not always be needed, but redesigns often come with content changes as well. Your writer must have a good grasp of SEO content writing. You need someone who understands your client’s target audience and can adapt to any writing topic or concept. Professionally rewriting content for a site can take up to 3 days.
However, if the redesign does not involve content changes, your writer should be able to transfer the existing content from the old site to the site being developed. This can take 1-2 days, depending on the amount of content, and should include the re-uploading of media files.
Quality Assurance
Evaluating and testing website functionality; verifying application functions according to the agreed design; reviewing standards, procedures, tools and development processes; reporting defects and bugs found — these are the responsibilities of the QA. He/she will evaluate the website’s adherence to the client’s design as well as its functionality. For this, you will need someone who has a keen eye for details. Your QA can either report to the project manager and/or work directly with the web designer or the developer for changes that are needed.
As each team member works on their assigned tasks, the project manager will periodically update the QA on what needs to be checked. For example, once design has been implemented, the QA will want to test them on both desktop and mobile screens for responsiveness. Adherence to the original design in terms of the header and footer, the font size, style and color; content margins should also be checked. The QA will also check whether applications, functions as well as page links are working.
SEO Analysts
An SEO analyst can help to make sure that the WordPress site that you deliver to clients is actually ready to rank well in search engines. Being able to offer websites that have proper on page optimization to clients will give you an edge over other agencies.
Hire someone who has a firm understanding of SEO best practices, as well as WordPress and the best plugins to use for SEO optimization. SEO Analysts should be able to analyze website traffic using tools like Google analytics. This should include integrations such as goal tracking.
An SEO analyst should spend time considering your client’s website. They should gather information from the existing website and compare it with a high ranking career coach website. From there, they can make strategy recommendations for how your client can begin to get better rankings within their niche.
Social Media Manager
While having social media managers is not a must — they provide an added value service to clients. With the availability of numerous plugins for social media links for WordPress sites, having someone who can capitalize on that can prove beneficial for your clients. They can create and secure appropriate social media accounts and make sure they are integrated well into the site as well as post website updates to these accounts.
A savvy social media manager can therefore help develop brand awareness and generate inbound traffic for your clients’ websites which can then result in sales leads conversion.
Every member of the team has a significant role in making the project a success. In web design manpower planning, the key is to find skilled people who can build your site efficiently and effectively. This is the kind of team that you need for your business.
