An introduction to Digital Project Management

If you’re in interested in getting into digital media, there are a few things you probably want to familiarise yourself with. This is our guide for new Project Managers (or 'Producers') who are looking to jump-start their career.

Agile

'Agile' is a word you will hear often in digital project management.

Agile refers to the method of approaching a project whereby a project is broken down into multiple tasks and assigned to a person. These tasks are then prioritised into a backlog and organised into 'Sprints'. A sprint can be any period of time, here at Mudbath sprints last a week. At the start of the sprint all tasks in the backlog are assessed and certain tasks that are achievable within the current sprint are brought forward.

Stages of development

A project will go through multiple stages of development which include:

Design

Design is more than choosing colours and images.

A large amount of consideration also goes into the UX, (user experience) which deals with how a user will interact with the site. For example, a user would normally expect the navigation bar to be at the top of the screen.

We sketch and prototype to get client and user feedback before we move into looking at visual design. This allows us to make sure that designs are usable first before worrying about details.

Development

Once the designs are accepted, the project moves into the development stage. This is where the design will get turned into code. Every element on the page, whether that be a block of colour or text will get turned into hard code. The programming languages that deal mostly with how the design is coded are CSS and HTML.

The other side of development which you don’t always see is what is called back-end, this refers to the CMS (content management system). Most websites are editable by a CMS, which manages the text and images on the website. Generally, a CMS has to be installed and customised for each site. When you log into your CMS and go to edit a specific webpage, the page you see was generally set up by a developer.

QA

The final stage of a project is QA, which stands for quality assurance. This involves testing the website. Some of the main items to check for include that there are no broken links between pages. Checking that the text and images are displaying correctly, e.g. has the font you picked actually displayed in the browser as intended?

It is also important to check the websites across multiple browsers eg. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and safari

Once all these steps are completed your website is ready to go live!

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Our team of highly experienced User Experience Designers and Developers can help you research, design and build your next website. Got an idea in the works? Get in touch.