Website Development Status Report
This is a practical guide to building a status report for a website development project — a periodic summary of progress, issues and next steps, adapted to the realities of designing and building a new website.
What a Status Report is
A status report is a periodic summary of progress, issues and next steps. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Status Report. On a website development project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Website Development project
Website Development projects live or die on designing and building a new website. A well-built status report gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how website development projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- Overall RAG status
- Progress vs plan
- Key risks and issues
- Budget/schedule health
- Decisions needed
Website Development-specific considerations
Tailor the status report to the risks that most often derail website development projects:
- Scope creep from stakeholder requests
- Content readiness delays
- Browser/device compatibility
Example
On a real website development project, the status report would be shaped by designing and building a new website. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — scope creep from stakeholder requests, content readiness delays, browser/device compatibility — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.