The Ideal Project Team

To start with you need somebody to bring in the business. This person obviously needs to be a good salesperson, but not in a pushy, telesales kind of way. They need to be confident and charismatic, comfortable presenting to the board or mixing at networking events. As they will be dealing primarily with other business people, it helps if they come from a business background. However they still need to have a solid understanding of the web.

Next you need somebody to manage and run the business. This person would be responsible for keeping projects on track, on time and on budget. They have to have excellent people management skills and need to be highly organised. They'll be ones keeping the office running, the wages paid and the accounts in shape.

Sometimes called a producer, information architect, or user experience designer, it's this persons job to work with the client to shape the direction of the project. This person will work out the strategy, craft the documentation and steer the project to a successful conclusion. This person will need technical, creative and managerial skills and will probably have worked their way up from a design or production role.

For most web projects, design accounts for less than 10% of the workload. Gone are the days of the dedicated visual designer. Instead, the ideal web team needs a hybrid designer who's as happy sitting in front of Photoshop as they are coding up a stylesheet. As well as being a being a great visual designer and knowing everything about web standards, this person needs to have an intimate knowledge of usability, accessibility and universal design.

Last but not least, you need a talented back end developer. More and more web design jobs are actually mini web applications, so programming is taking up much of the project cycle. However rather than an ivory tower developer, you need somebody who understands people as much as they understand code. As such this person needs to be a strong communicator.

For small teams to work well together, there needs to be a good overlap of skills. Each person needs to have an understanding of what the other person is doing and the problems they face. These skills will overlap the most with the user experience designer who's job it is to direct the project. Each team member needs to be a good communicator and happy talking to clients, attending meetings or running pitches.

Labels are always a difficult one, but if I had to label these roles they'd be.

* Sales and Marketing Manager
* Project Manager and Office Manager
* User Experience Designer
* Front End Designer/Developer
* Back End Developer

That's my ideal web team. What's yours and why?