Quality Websites are Worth Planning For

When choosing an agency to design your website, are you getting what you're paying for?

In nearly every instance, public-facing, commercial websites don't exist in a vacuum. They are part of a strategy intended to influence thought and/or behavior of a specific audience. Hopefully the strategy is comprehensive.

The measure of their success, then, is not only whether each hyperlink points to the right place or that it displays in exactly the same way in every single browser and is accessible by 99.9% of the population. These things represent an important aspect of quality, 

Quality is the assurance that any given solution will effectively solve a given problem that accurately reflects a specific business environment.

This is the essential distinction that differentiates Total Quality Management (TQM) from quality control. Quality control is making sure technical details are free from defects. TQM is making sure the problem is solved efficiently. Making the distinction, in part, helps companies tell the difference between specialty production boutiques and full-service, interactive marketing partners.

Production boutiques do what they're asked, and they often do it marvelously. There's no shame in using them. Full-service, interactive marketing agencies, on the other hand, ought to, if they have been given the mandate, make sure that what they're building solves the problem.

This requires, among other things, making sure that the problem has been correctly identified in the first place. Done thoroughly, the process by which this is definitively determined can very easily slaughter one or two sacred cows, but it's a necessary unpleasantness, if the final work is to deliver meaningful results to the client.

Do marketing agencies have all the answers, then? Not at all. God knows -- marketing agencies aren't always right.

Sometimes they're even spectacularly wrong.

But if you hired them to solve a business problem within a specific business context, you should be able to challenge them to identify and justify the assumptions and reasoning that led them to the solutions they're proposing. A good partner will provide that for you.

It isn't free, but doing the job right, even if you spent more in research, is less costly than doing it wrong. - Cam Beck