Forrester Research published a study that claims over 90% of web projects fail. Other research companies peg the percentage of failures between 30-70%, depending on industry.

These are terrible odds, when you’re putting your company’s hard-earned money and reputation on the line.

I want to help you flip those odds around so that over 90% of your projects succeed. That’s the ratio of hits to misses at Genius Monkeys (www.geniusmonkeys.com), and it’s the success rate I’ve had with web design and new media clients over the past 10+ years.

Thinking back on these successes, a few key points that are common to all successful projects stand out. Here they are, in no particular order:

• A successful project has clearly defined and measurable goals. What do you want to do? What’s the purpose of this project? Who’s the audience for it? Preproduction and preparation is vital, and it must happen before committing to design mockups, site maps, or writing content.

  Once we’re awarded a project we insist on meeting with the client to get answers to these and many other questions. We actually have a checklist we go through at this meeting, as part of preproduction.

  After all, if you don’t know where you’re going how will you know when you get there?

• Successful projects need leaders. Web projects tend to cross organizational lines. There are typically many stakeholders, including Marketing, Sales, Human Resources, IT, and others.

  It’s important to get input from all stakeholders in the project. But it’s equally important to have a single, defined project leader.

  If you don’t, you’ll find yourself pulled in many directions and unable to proceed.

• Communication is vital. I’m not talking meeting after meeting and memos by the dozen. Successful web projects require clear and concise communication between the project leader and the web design company.

  Many clients approach web projects as if they were a black art. And many web companies encourage that approach. That’s wrong. Insist on transparency. Know what your web shop is doing, and if you don’t understand what they say, ask to be educated. If they can’t explain things in a way you can understand, get a new web design company.

  This is really important when it comes to technology choices as well as design decisions. For example, a client of ours came to us after they’d already spent almost $50,000 on a new website, including a custom content management system (CMS). Our client is very unhappy that the web company locked them into a proprietary CMS that makes anything beyond the most rudimentary text changes a real pain in the butt.

  Unfortunately, it won’t be cheap to help them out of this mess. We’re going to have to redo the entire website back end. If they’d known that their previous company was trying to lock them into a proprietary, closed system they could have saved a lot of money and a ton of frustration by saying no.

• Processes are key. You want to work with web design shops that have a well-defined production process. Genius Monkeys developed our process over many years, adding and refining to it as we gained experience delivering successful projects to clients ranging from Fortune 500 to small startups.

  Ask your web design company what their process is before they begin work on your project. It should involve a preproduction phase, a production phase with milestones for review, and a post production evaluation period.

I hope that this short list has been useful. As always, I invite you to contact me if you like what I’ve written, or if you think I’ve missed anything. You can also just leave a comment here.