How To Create A Website Project Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide

175 new websites go live every minute. But while website development projects are common, they’re far from easy. Without a clear website project plan, things can spiral — think missed deadlines, disorganized teams, and scope creep, all combining to create unhappy customers.

Luckily, thanks to the almost 1.2 billion websites worldwide, there’s a lot of knowledge out there to draw from to plan the perfect new website to build on time and without chaos.

This article provides an easy-to-use checklist so you can deliver your next web design project without fuss, hassle, or stakeholder drama!

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• A website project plan is a roadmap for your project team, helping everyone understand what needs to be done, when, and by whom.
• Project plans align everyone on the goals, objectives, scope, tasks, and risks of a project while helping you avoid unnecessary delays and spend.
• To create a project plan, start by defining the project specifics before diving into a detailed scope of work. Once that’s agreed upon, break down your tasks, plan out the schedule, and put it all in your project management tool to track going forward.
• Toggl Track and Toggl Plan are the perfect partners for planning and managing projects, giving you full oversight of your schedule and milestones while tracking your team’s time and cost.

What is a website project plan, and why do you need one?

A website project plan is a structured roadmap that guides the entire process of building or redesigning a website. It outlines the project’s goals, scope, timeline, tasks, and responsibilities, ensuring everyone involved knows what needs to happen, when, and by whom. They’re pretty handy, so we believe all web projects should have a project plan — period.

You see, creative web design projects have many moving parts and often require multiple rounds of redesign revisions. Without a plan, you risk getting caught up in this noise and complexity, leading to:

• ❌ Wasted time on endless discussions that put you behind schedule
• ❌ Spending budget you don’t need on costly resources
• ❌ Delivering poor quality outputs that don’t meet your objectives

A good project plan avoids these pitfalls by setting a clear foundation of the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’, and ‘who’ of a successful delivery. This includes:

• ✅ Defining the project’s goals and objectives to align everyone on what success looks like
• ✅ Setting the project scope of what will (and won’t) be done
• ✅ Breaking down the step-by-step tasks, how long each one will take, and their costs
• ✅ Scheduling the work to highlight any dependencies or bottlenecks
• ✅ Assigning the right team members to each task to create ownership and accountability
• ✅ Uncovering the risks that might trip you so you can take action to avoid them

Sure, any project can still go wrong, but you exponentially increase your chances of success if you have a good project plan template to lean on.

How to plan a website development project

Let’s break down the steps to planning a fantastic website design and development project. These tips are a mix of our experiences, feedback, and input from our agency customers, who are building new websites every day.

Of course, these tips are a high-level guide. You should always adapt them to suit your processes, workflows, and clients to deliver the best results.

1. Define the project

Before racing into planning your project, step back and clarify what you’re delivering. Definition is about uncovering and agreeing on the project specifics, including questions like “What does success look like?” or “Who is the target audience?”

Here’s how to break it down.

Strategy & context

Work with your client to learn why they need a website project. What’s wrong with the website they have right now — what’s working and what isn’t?

Alongside this, understand how this project contributes to their broader company strategy. Are they looking for enhanced functionality to drive more sales? Are they undertaking a full rebrand? Do they need to improve their e-commerce user experience?

Whatever it is, get clear on your client’s ‘why’ to maximize your chances of delivering something high-quality and impactful.

Example: GreenNotes creates premium, 100% recycled notepads for consumers and businesses, enabling them to do their jobs while reducing their environmental impact. Having grown to $100,000 revenue per year, their strategy is to increase revenue to $500,000 in 3 years through a digital-first transformation.

Goals & Objectives

Once you know the background, get clear on the future and what success looks like from a successful website design project.

Work collaboratively to define your goals and objectives so everyone agrees on the outputs and outcomes. We’d recommend using a goals and objectives framework:

• SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound
• PACT — Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable
• FAST — Focused, Aligned, Specific, Time-bound
• OKRs — Objectives and Key Results
• WOOP — Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan

Example: GreenNotes set five objectives for their website project to meet their strategy goals:

• The team plans to optimize the website for search engine optimization (SEO) and be compatible with Google Analytics.
• The website will integrate with GreenNotes CRM platform and social media accounts.
• The website will be live with at least 10 unique pages within 8 weeks.
• The website will receive at least 100 daily unique users with a 5% conversion rate within six months of go-live.
• The website will rank in the #20 on Google for 5 relevant keywords within one year of go-live.

Customers & Target Audience

To define design aspects such as color schemes, landing pages, and page layouts, it’s important to know who the client’s customers and target audience are.

The best website design projects optimize the functionality, usability, messaging, and tone for the target audience, maximizing adoption and engagement once the website is live.

In most projects, this information comes from the clients themselves. But in some instances, they may ask you to support with persona mapping, competitive analysis, or target audience definition.

Example: GreenNotes has a solid understanding of its target market, which is broken into two categories:

• Eco-conscious professionals aged 30-50 who need high-quality notepads for their day-to-day work
• Organizations buying premium notepads for events with a focus on sustainability

Project stakeholders

Projects are people-focused endeavors, so be clear on who’s involved, both within your organization and from the client’s side.

Specifically, assign a project manager, project sponsor (the decision maker), and contributors for design and development activities. This is everyone you need to make fast progress, solve issues, and make decisions.

Example: GreenNotes nominates a Project Sponsor, the Head of Sales & Marketing, to lead the project and make decisions. They also bring a Sales Executive, Brand Associate, and Marketing Manager into the wider project team to support the agency development team.

2. Create a scope of work

Once you’ve set the project foundation, create a detailed scope of work (sometimes called a statement of work) that aligns everyone on exactly what the project includes and excludes.

The process of creating a scope of work defines the deliverables (such as wireframes, prototypes, or content strategy drafts) and establishes boundaries to avoid unnecessary scope creep later on.

Here’s how it works.

Requirements

Project requirements are the specific features, functions, and outcomes that stakeholders expect from a project. Capturing these with your stakeholders is a great way to build your project scope.

In most cases, project teams will host requirements workshops, working collaboratively with stakeholders to uncover what they need. This is a crucial part of website planning, delivering a clear view of what’s required.

Example: The project team works with GreenNotes to discuss their project requirements. In total, they capture over 50 requirements, including:

• The website must have a homepage to host key information
• Product pricing should be clearly visible and display any eligible customer discounts
• The website must allow integrations with other systems

What’s in?

From your list of requirements, define what’s in scope for your project. This provides a list of outputs for the project team and sets the baseline for the project’s progress.

Define this clearly to remove ambiguity from the brief. This is especially important for a design agency, as profit margins can quickly erode if the project experiences scope creep later.

What’s out?

On the flip side, a good scope of work will also clearly define what’s ‘out of scope.’ This is an important addition that’s often forgotten. Defining what’s out of scope sets clear boundaries and aligns everyone’s expectations from the start.

Example: After further discussions, the project team agrees with GreenNotes that the following items will be in and out of scope:

• In — Website build of 15 web pages, including building the website structure on WordPress
• In — Redesign of GreenNotes branding and marketing materials, including social media, logo, fonts, and style guide
• Out — Custom website development using HTML or CSS
• Out — Copywriting will be completed by GreenNotes and provided to the project team for upload

Scope of work document

Like many parts of good project management, it’s best to formalize your scope in an official scope of work document. This gives everyone a clear point of reference if there’s any ambiguity or conflict later.

Learn more by checking out our step-by-step statement of work guide.

3. Identify project phases and activities

All projects follow a very similar lifecycle, and a website redesign project is no different. To keep everyone on track, we recommend breaking your project down into logic stages, each including clear objectives and activities. Here’s an example of the types of phases you could use on your website build.

Design foundations

In this phase, you establish the foundation of your web design project by agreeing on a clear statement of your design and brand principles.

By the end, your global design elements will underpin the design of your website pages. This is a highly creative phase, where you’ll work closely with the client to generate concepts and agree on a final specification.

Content preparation

After confirming the outline of your website, gather all the content required for the website. The sitemap and the page layout styles created in the previous phase guide the necessary content.

You may find that some content is already available from the client’s current website or other marketing materials; alternatively, work from scratch if things require a refresh.

Design & software development

The project team starts designing and developing the website’s pages using a chosen development methodology. Activities in this phase depend on the sitemap, layouts, and content collected in the previous two phases and your preferred hosting technology.

Testing

In this phase, you validate the website’s functionality and verify that it matches the requirements you captured earlier.

Depending on the client’s needs, various types of testing, including functional, accessibility, and performance testing, may be necessary. In some cases, you’ll also need to test the website for SEO optimization and streamline pages to boost usability.

Go live & handover

Once you’ve tested the website and resolved any issues, it’s time to put it live to the world. As part of this process, you’ll also hand the website over to the client, training them on the backend management tools so they can update their site in the future.

4. Create a project schedule

Once you’ve set your project phases, it’s time to make a detailed project schedule. This breaks down all the tasks in each phase, estimating how long they’ll take and assigning an owner to each. Here are some tips for creating a project schedule:

Task breakdown & estimation

Tools such as a work breakdown structure break complex projects down into clear, manageable tasks. There are several estimating techniques to plan how long each task will take, including:

• Top-down: Estimate the project duration as a whole, then divide it into smaller task estimates based on experience or historical data
• Bottom-up: Estimate each individual task separately, then roll them up to get the full project timeline
• PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique): Use optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely time estimates to calculate a weighted average for each task.

Remember, alongside time estimating, also complete project cost estimating. Nothing comes for free, so whether it’s labor costs, software licenses, or cash costs for external support, estimate the cost of each project task, too.

Assign resources

With your tasks estimated, assign a team member to each one. Doing this early on gives you a clear view of the resources you’ll need to deliver the project.

Optimizing project resources is a crucial part of great project management, so it’s key to have the right people at the right time without causing bottlenecks or conflicts.

Once you’ve assigned project team members to each task, you can build out a project resource plan to visualize who you’ll need when, enabling you to plan your team capacity.

Use Tools like Toggl Plan

The best projects use tools to plan their tasks, create schedules, manage resources, and visualize their plans with Gantt charts.

With Toggl Plan, creating a project timeline is as easy as one, two, three. Here’s how it works:

1. Click on the ‘+’ sign to create a new project. Give it a name, assign a client, and add an overall estimate.
2. From the Board or Timeline view, begin adding your tasks, including when they start, when they are added, and what they are.
3. Once they’re created, assign them to the right members of your project team and automatically add them to their to-do lists.
4. If you’re working to hard deadlines, click on a date to add a project milestone, giving you a clear target for your team to aim at.
5. From there, you’ve got everything you need to run a successful project, with one central place for your team to collaborate, track work, and keep tabs on your progress.

More of a visual learner? Here’s an explainer video to show you how to create beautifully simple project plans in Toggl Plan. 👇

Don’t forget to plan your communications, too

A common mistake project teams make is focusing solely on the functional work to build a slick website. Within your project plan, create a communications plan, too, making time for routines such as weekly check-ins, reports, and feedback sessions with your client.

This is especially important in the development phase, where you’ll want to get feedback at the end of every sprint to align your website closely with your client’s expectations.

The best way to manage your web development project?

Creating a project plan is only half the battle. Once you’ve mapped out your tasks and resources, you’ve got to actually….deliver a new website. Project tracking, whether it’s timelines, budgets, or scope, is key to hitting deadlines and ensuring deliverables meet the objectives.

Once you’re up and running on delivery, here are some best practices to guide you:

• 🦁 Stakeholder management is king. Project management is a very people-focused activity, so focus on building stakeholder relationships. This can be as simple as daily project updates, weekly check-ins, or more formal touchpoints to align on progress, make decisions, or solve problems.
• ⚠️ Pay attention to risk management. The best project managers dedicate regular time to identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks in front of them. Of course, every project will experience bumps in the road, so ringfence time to get ahead before they cause a significant problem.
• ⏲️ Automate time and milestone tracking. Many project managers waste time manually tracking time and milestone admin, bogging them down in unnecessary detail. Time tracking tools, like Toggl Track, simplify these processes, giving managers real-time insights into how long different tasks take and where to reallocate resources.
• 📚 Learn lessons to be better in the future. While most website projects share similar characteristics, no two projects are completely the same. To improve from project to project, complete a lessons learned assessment, capturing what went well and what you could improve on in the future.
• 📊 Get comfortable with data. In the modern world of project management, it’s important to capture and analyze project data. Project metrics such as progress vs. plan, spend vs. budget, resource utilization percentage, and milestone status illuminate areas of concern and enable the team to make well-informed decisions.

Toggl tools for project and resource management

Great, you have everything you need to create your next website project plan, maximizing your chances of success and keeping your clients happy.

Remember, project management software is your best friend when planning and managing creative projects. Luckily, our two tools, Toggl Plan and Toggl Track, work perfectly together to guide you through the planning and management process. Here’s what they offer:

• Toggl Plan is perfect for scheduling, task assignments, and visually tracking progress through its intuitive timelines. A beautiful design and simple functionality make it easy to spot dependencies, bottlenecks, and potential conflicts so you can eliminate risks before they turn ugly.
• Toggl Track provides crystal-clear clarity into how time is spent on each task or project phase. It strikes a balance between enabling your team to log their time without feeling like you’re spying on them, with automatic timesheets reducing admin while generating instant project insights.

The best news? Get started with Toggl for free, allowing you to start testing timelines or tracking your time with no upfront commitment. Create a free Toggl account and start your test drive today — just two clicks, one login, and no credit card required!