A Guide to Scoping Your Small Website Project

Published: February 4th, 2025

Every website manager knows the feeling: your list of potential improvements keeps growing, but your time and resources stay frustratingly finite. Whether you're managing a content overhaul, tackling a features backlog, or planning a redesign, the challenge remains the same: how do you turn an overwhelming list of possibilities into a realistic action plan?

With three simple tools—smart prioritization, realistic estimation, and systematic scoping—you can create a practical roadmap for your website projects. Let's go through this process, and I'll share a template that brings it all together (free registration required).

1. List Everything Out

Before you can prioritize or estimate anything, you need a clear picture of what you're working with. Start by listing out every task, feature, or update you're considering. Don't worry about organizing or evaluating them yet—just get them all down in one place.

Be specific: instead of "improve About section," break it down into concrete tasks like "update staff bios" or "add mission statement." The clearer each item is, the easier it will be to prioritize and estimate later. If you're working with a team, this is a good time to gather input from everyone involved to ensure nothing gets missed.

2. Smart Prioritization with MoSCoW

First, let's tackle that mountain of tasks with a simple but powerful prioritization method. The MoSCoW approach helps you sort your tasks into four clear categories:

• Must Have: These are your non-negotiables. The project can't move forward without them. Ask yourself, "Will the project still function without this?" If the answer is no, it's a "Must Have." Be selective here—if everything is a priority, nothing truly is.

• Should Have: These are important things that will greatly improve the project, but aren't essential. Include these if they are low-effort, but don't let them derail you.

• Could Have: These are your "nice to haves". They add value but aren't critical. If time or budget allows, include them. Otherwise, save them for later.

• Won't Have: These won't be included in the current project at all, but it's useful to document why. By keeping track of what you've ruled out, you avoid revisiting the same discussions later.

This system works whether you're prioritizing alone or with a team. For large groups, consider using a survey to collect everyone's thoughts, then only discuss items where opinions differ. This approach saves valuable meeting time while ensuring all voices are heard.

3. Realistic Estimation Using T-shirt Sizes

Now that you know what you want to do, it's time to figure out how big each task is. Instead of trying to estimate exact hours (which rarely works out anyway), use T-shirt sizes. For instance, for a fairly small project, you could use these T-shirt sizes:

• XS (Extra Small): Quick fixes, about 1-2 hours

• S (Small): Half-day tasks, about 4 hours

• M (Medium): Tasks spanning 1-2 days

• L (Large): Week-long tasks

• XL (Extra Large): Projects of 2+ weeks (consider breaking these down!)

For a larger project, you could add in different hour estimates for each T-shirt size.

Just remember the One-Hour Rule: Even seemingly simple tasks—like updating a page or tweaking a graphic—take longer than you think. By the time you figure out precisely what needs to change, make the edits, proof them, get approval, and switch your focus to the next thing, you're looking at least half an hour. If you run into issues, it’s more like an hour, on average.

4. Defining Workable Scope

Here's where our Task Prioritization Template (free registration required) comes in handy. This template helps you see if a "must-have" task that takes three weeks is actually more or less valuable right now than three "should-have" tasks you could knock out in a day each.

A real-life example: A client recently faced a content audit of over 1,000 articles (yes, you read that right). Each article needed evaluation for multiple factors: readability, completeness, and alignment with a style guide. The sheer scale made it impossible to tackle everything at once.

Using an early version of the template, we input each article's priority (based on traffic and strategic importance) and size estimate (based on how much work it needed). The template calculated a Value Score for each task—the lower the score, the better the return on our time investment.

The results were eye-opening. Instead of starting with the longest, most comprehensive articles (which seemed intuitive since they had more content), we discovered a large cluster of short, one-paragraph articles that could each be improved in under an hour. By tackling these first, we could quickly transform dozens of incomplete-looking pages into proper resources for users, making a visible impact on the overall quality of the site.

5. Putting It All Together

Here's how to use this approach for your own projects:

1. List out all your tasks

2. Assign each one a MoSCoW priority

3. Estimate the size using T-shirt sizing

4. Input all three into the template

5. Sort by the Value Score

6. Use the running total of hours to see what fits in your time budget

But remember—the spreadsheet is a tool, not your boss! Use your judgment to adjust the results. Sometimes tasks that appear unrelated actually make more sense to tackle together. For instance, if three "About Us" pages need updates, you might want to handle them as a group even if they don't score consecutively.

And an important caveat: the template works best for small projects—think one person's time, maybe two. This isn't meant for large team projects where coordination time becomes a major factor. If you've ever heard of the phrase "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" or the more colorful analogy "nine women can't make a baby in one month", it's the same principle—some things just don't scale linearly with more people. This template is particularly useful for consistent types of work, like content updates or a list of possible website enhancements. If you’re ready to try it yourself, download the template and start bringing method to the madness.