Key Points:
Perhaps my biggest pet peeve in our industry is people thinking way too small about their web presences. One-off microsites are an example, where they may be touted as a big splash when really they usually hinder broader goals of the organization (such as maintaining brand consistency over the long term). Or revamp / migration projects where a tiny glimpse of the total web presence "face" of your organization is changed (or some initial sections are launched without a real plan to make changes across the board). But it goes even deeper: even the way teams are organized, sometimes people who "manage the web" only manage a small fraction of what site visitors experience when interacting with you on the web.
I propose using a number when talking about our web presences and the changes we consider making to them: pages under discussion / total pages site visitors can see = potential extent of impact.
Yes yes, the potential impact of a change is more complicated than that. But part of our problem is distilling complex websites into something we can wrap our hands around. And the extent of proposed changes is a key factor, and one that in my experience is radically underrepresented in planning.
For the pages exposed to site visitors, these are all the pages site visitors are able to see. Got 100 websites? This is the total pages across all those websites. Got various sections of your site, even some sections that aren't in your control? What's the count of all those pages. Different sites that customers use over the lifetime of their relationship with your organization? Count all those pages. The exact number doesn't matter at all, but the order of magnitude does: do you have 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 pages exposed to site visitors?
Now, when considering a change, how many pages are you talking about changing? Don't cheat with this number. This isn't what pages potentially could benefit from the change, but how many are you specifically planning on changing?
Let's look at some examples using a hypothetical website. Let's assume you have a single site that has 10,000 pages and 6,000 of these is in your CMS:
- You are planning on making a change to the templates in the CMS to make them responsive. This has a potential extent of impact of 60% (6,000/10,000).
- You are constrained by your current CMS and want to create an interactive data analysis tool, so want to create a microsite for interacting with the data of your latest report. This has a potential extent of impact of less than 1% (a small number of pages / 10,000).
- You change the global search engine to be more effective. The 6,000 pages in the CMS as well as another 3,000 can easily be configured to use (and be indexed by) the new engine. This has a potential extent of impact of 90%.
- You have been talking with one section owner (with 1,000 pages, all in the CMS) about their need to include maps on their section (let's assume maps would be useful across your site). This section owner is technically sophisticated, so you are considering suggesting iframes for the owner to embed the maps. This has a potential extent of impact of 10% (rethinking this and talking with all site owners about their needs around mapping could increase this to 60%).
- You want to refocus your website, and as part of that propose dropping 1,000 of the pages outside the CMS and 3,000 in the CMS. This has a potential extent of impact of 40%.
Obviously, many changes you need to make will have a very low potential extent of impact so this isn't the only factor. But thinking about this number encourages good behaviors:
- Obviously, reducing your total number of pages helps boost these ratios (for example, after executing on the last item in the list above, you forever have an easier time having a higher impact extent). Also, many changes you need to make will have higher potential extent of impact.
- There may be ways of reframing problems to have a wider impact. For instance, in the example of making the site responsive, perhaps you decide to start by making a wider change (to some pages outside the CMS) rather than deeply refining the first cut of responsive in the CMS.
- All things being equal, the change that would impact a larger percentage of changes should be implemented.
