Just watched this film (for like the tenth time), last week. And you know what? - There are definitely parallels to creating an awesome company website, and executing a precise plan of attack against three of the largest casinos in Vegas…
Daniel Ocean is released on parole after a four year jail sentence for theft and immediately starts planning the robbery of a high security vault shared by three Las Vegas casinos. He tracks down his right hand man and together they assemble a team of eleven highly skilled guys to rob the Casinos. Every move is precisely thought out using the skills of each of the men…
What has this to do with building a website?
If you are going to pull off the spectacular, and create the next big thing online, you need to keep in mind a few things, the same sort of things that we see Danny Ocean execute with gusto..
1) Precision planning.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Every project requires planning, and that includes a decent project manager. Mr Clooney was this guy in the film, and you have to make sure that there’s someone on your team that is going to come up with the goods for you. (Oh - but make sure he hasn’t just finished a stint in the slammer, we’ll take no responsibility for that one). Every last detail needs to be thought about, and assigned to each member of your crack web design team…which brings us to the next point.
2) The perfect team
In Ocean’s eleven Danny Ocean had the perfect team, including an explosives expert, a pickpocket excellence, two getaway drivers, a geeky electronics genius and a chinese acrobat. You need to make sure that you have your own explosives expert (Your lead developer - with his dynamite coding skills), your own pickpocket (Your sales director, coming up with ways of upselling to your customers), two getaway drivers (your sales executives - driving the business to new places), a geeky electronics genius (the network engineer who knows his SQL server from his Oracle) and last but not least your chinese acrobat - the flexible all rounder who can get the business out of trouble in the tightest of situations - and scale it.
Which is why you need a crack commando web development team.
3) The element of surprise
No - don’t surprise your visitors, they’ll only end leaving your site. That means - no popups, no disabling the back button, nothing out of the ordinary in your code. Where you can come up trumps though - is in your website content. Surprise visitors with a twist in your writing. Think like a movie director, and add swirls of flowing prose which will call visitors to action.
4) Think bigger
Danny decided to go for the biggest and best Vegas casinos - in one heist. Why aren’t you targetting bigger customers with your marketing, and showing them that although your team is small, your service offering is bigger than some of your larger competitors. Think big, and the bigger fish will come.
5) Try something that hasn’t been done
There’s a hundred reasons it wont work, but dont let that stop you. Never give up, and never let anyone tell your website plans are doot. Hard work, and great execution are the key to a successful website project.
