One Website, Many Vendors: How Do You Make It Work?

February 6, 2010 | by Jill Kurtz | Posted in Web Development

The best websites leverage many tools to create an engaging, interactive experience for users. For the typical association, this means integrating your association management system, your press tools, your advocacy tools, and other core management systems with your website.

You also need to think about using a variety of website tools like e-commerce tools, content management systems, calendaring tools, mapping tools, and more to offer a feature-rich site.

So many tools! And, often different vendors provide and support them.

So, how do you effectively present ONE website that leverages all of them? How do you get all your vendors to see the same common goal and work together toward a seamless, integrated web presence?

At Balance, we find that we are often collaborating with other vendors on our efforts to create great websites for our clients. We have been involved in great collaborations. We have also been involved in some projects that are marked by more of a vendor finger-pointing contest than a shared goal. This is frustrating for us and for our clients.

So, we have started to do some research into this issue. I am looking for real-life examples of organizations that have managed multiple vendors in their website redesign and development efforts. I want to learn about what worked and what didn’t. I’d like to help us all to learn how to navigate the waters better and avoid the issues that can bog a project down and lead to poor results.

I hope you will take time to complete our research survey. You can do so anonymously or give me your contact information so I can cite you as an example in the white paper we will publish with the results.