The most important factor you can control for making a website successful is strategy.
A Birdseye’s view of what you want and you how you want to get there is needed, not online marketing, or usability. It’s managing the whole process from idea to aftersales. I believe all the rest is part of that management process.
While doing a lot of development of websites for smaller businesses in Brazil, some years ago, I found these entrepreneurs lacked completely a view of what was important in a website. They relied on me to filter the ideas. Their trust in me was a great compliment, but it started a flow of thought about making this stuff more understandable.
In 2005, while doing an MBA in information technology, I got acquainted with the balanced scorecard and the beauty of it’s simplicity when communicating it to businesses. Businesses understand setting goals. This together with the lack of vision of my clients when talking about websites made me create a method for defining together with the client a strategy for a website using the balanced scorecard. I called it the webbsc, the webscorecard.
What really surprised me while writing about this idea (for my MBA-thesis, scientific articles and a chapter in a book sponsored by the Brazilian government) it that nobody really talked about the use of the BSC on the internet.
And it is such valuable knowledge: It gave me the tool I needed to communicate to my clients about abstract issues regarding their website. It gave the logic and reference my clients needed to decide what is important and what is just a bell or whistle.
And more, for the client it gave a way of controlling the whole process related to a website a lot earlier. They knew better what toe expect, when the site was ready, they were ready.
So two years after writing my first paper, I decided to start this website. I’ll try to show here the whole process of developing a website, from the idea to the after sale of the 1.000.000 client you sold to.