One of the secrets of a successful website improvement project, or even just day-to-day website management, is to make sure that the right people are given the right information to view and the right tasks to complete.  

This is true for new website projects or redesigns, but also for ongoing improvements, for example in driving up content quality or moving towards accessibility compliance. In particular, technical people responsible for front-end coding and non-technical people responsible for content, will have different skillsets and knowledge to draw upon, so they need to be given the appropriate tasks and activities that relate to their specialist area.

Why targeting by role is important

Ensuring the right roles are given the right information and tasks is important because:

• It helps save time and increases efficiency
• It reduces the chance of errors and mistakes being made
• It helps individuals and teams to stay motivated and engaged, and not feel “out of their depth”
• It means different issues and fixes are far more likely to get done there and then and not get ignored
• It means people have the right level of understanding and more context to interpret information, prioritise actions and make decisions
• It familiarises individuals with common issues and how to fix them, helping to drive appropriate knowledge and helping to prevent the issues appearing the first place though such education
• It helps ensure project momentum and progress, keeping everything on track.

In particular, targeting the right information and tasks to the right roles is very important when a person is busy, or website improvement is not the core part of their day job. Within a busy working day, if a person is asked to complete a task that it not really intended for them and provokes either confusion or they don’t understand what needs to be done, it is far more likely to get left and possibly not completed; this is where an email then gets forgotten about and lies unactioned in a person’s inbox.  

Removing barriers to progress

In the Sitemorse platform the automated separation of prioritised issues and required fixes targeted to different roles has consistently proved essential to making progress in improving websites. The roles with the appropriate skillsets are presented with the appropriate issues to resolve. Information is also appropriately targeted, hard-baked into different reporting views, again ensuring relevance.

This targeting by role not only saves digital managers a huge amount of time as they do not have to sort through the list of issues and instruct which team member needs to complete each issue, but also helps to drive engagement with different team members.

The net impact of targeting roles with the appropriate issues is to remove some of the barriers to getting things done and making progress.

Different roles: Manager, Content Editor, Developer

Recently, Sitemorse Support Lead Helen Grimley, wrote about the differences in Sitemorse reporting which is targeted to three different roles:

• Manager (the overall website or digital manager)
• Content Editor (responsible for content pages)
• Developer (responsible for front end coding).

For example, among other reporting items, a Developer role receives information about the top five coding quality issues as well as the top five accessibility actions. Meanwhile a digital or website manager will receive information relating to Search Engine Optimization (SE0) or an alert if a domain has expired, for example.

Of course, occasionally an issue targeted to a different role may still need some input from another member of the team, but overall the automated approach helps to streamline website management and means issues get fixed.

Role-based targeting and prioritisation works

Do not underestimate the importance of role-based targeting and prioritisation in making progress in website improvement. When technical and non-technical people see the information that is relevant to them, they are more likely to act on it; if they see stuff that is not relevant, they won’t. Meanwhile digital managers can get the wider overview of the items that matter.

The evolution of Sitemorse has been guided by feedback from clients about what works and what works less well. Clients tell us that role-based prioritisation is a major positive feature of the platform.