One of the big lessons I've learned over the years is:

If you don't ask the right questions, you won't get the right answers.

That's especially true in technology-related situations because the average business owner knows very little about the topic, and the average employee has limited knowledge that's centered around their job responsibilities.

Asking the right questions is crucial in planning a new website or online marketing project. It's called Project Roadmapping in our business, and it's about thoroughly planning your project from all angles, providing checks and balances to avoid decisions that result in a quagmire.

We've worked with clients who've made mistakes like:

• thinking a proposal included a certain step only to realize at the end of the project it didn't, and having to pay 20% more for that one step (without it the site was practically useless);
• paying tens of thousands for a website that had no strategic plan and provided essentially no business benefit. Basically, a glorified brochure;
• making system choices based on a designer's preferences that didn't provide a foundation for future strategic growth, which meant they had to throw out a project and start over as they grew;
• missing a critical piece of information when making a decision because they didn't know what to ask and their consultant or vendor or staff didn't volunteer the information;
• and copying someone else's RFP for their own project (not smart because no two situations are alike).

Our strength is in providing advice where marketing, technology, and even operations overlap.

We excel in brainstorming to help you envision the future, developing a Project Roadmap that identifies:

• where you want to be and how you want to get there,
• your strengths and how to exploit them,
• your weaknesses and how to minimize them,
• what problems may arise,
• readily available systems that can grow as you grow, and
• who is responsible for what.

To learn more about project roadmapping, read our article "How a Project Roadmap saves money and time."

If you're serious about making the right critical decisions to develop a good, solid foundation for your website and online marketing, take a look at our Baker's Dozen Project Compatability Checklist to see if we might be a good match.