As a web professional, I’m frequently called in by clients to help clean up a website project that has gone awry. While I’m happy to help and grateful for the work, I find it frustrating to see so many small businesses struggle with this same problem over and over again. I find it a shame because most small business owners I know are pretty savvy about running their companies, and yet the mistakes they make in designing their site tend to be at the most basic level. So here I offer a few steps that can make your website design project run more smoothly.
Step 1: Set the Goals
The selection of the right web designer or agency to build your online presence should be taken on with the same goals and planning as any other expansion of your business. Unfortunately for many small businesses, the hire of the web designer behind their project becomes a second thought, hiring your cousin's-wife's-friend's-brother, or worse, just taking the lowest bid you can find, rather than doing the homework that you would for any in-house hire that you consider as a valued asset.
In the long run, these kinds of mistakes lead to customer dissatisfaction, and even the creation of a site that must be scrapped merely because it doesn’t meet the end goals of the company. You must first set the goals and then find the right person/people to achieve those goals.
Begin your search for a web design professional by first asking yourself what your objectives are for your website. Do you need an ecommerce solution? Should your website collect leads for your sales force? Do you need a product demo or portfolio to showcase what you offer?
You may or may not know the answers to all these questions, and an experienced designer or firm can certainly help you determine these, but if you don’t begin by asking these questions, you won’t start searching for the right candidate for the job. If you need ecommerce, find someone who has done it before and done it successfully. If you need product demos, find someone who understands how to do that.
Step 2: Build the Right Team
As a business owner, you would never bring in a new employee that didn’t fit with the scheme of your business or with the personalities with the rest of your staff. It could be detrimental to your sales process or customer satisfaction if a team member didn’t have the right experience to do the job or couldn’t work well with the rest of your staff. For all intents and purposes, your web designer is a temporary member of your staff, and you should consider that before hiring them.
Although not necessarily a full time employee, your web designer is a member of your marketing team. Your web designer needs to understand the various aspects of your businesses, from sales, to offline marketing, to production in order to ensure that the website you build together should not only reflect your business, but also represent your business goals. Your web designer should be able to interact with every person in your company whose job is affected by the website to understand not only what they do, but how they do their jobs and how the website will be part of their job.
When you choose your designer, be sure that you have a good personality fit both with yourself AND your key staff members and ensure they are qualified for the job. You want your web design professional to be comfortable requesting information, and your staff to be comfortable voicing their concerns. And when it comes to understanding his or her qualifications, you don’t have to understand programming code to understand if someone has done the kind of work you need done. Ask for portfolio samples and review them.
Step 3: Set a Plan and Follow It
Once you’ve assessed your needs and found the right person who can meet those needs, it’s time to work together toward your goals. If you have a small or simple site, there may be just a simple plan to execute. If your site is more complex or requires multiple deadlines to complete, be sure those are spelled out. A web design professional should be able to clearly explain how to reach the goals you’ve set, and give you a rough timeline to get there.
In addition, make sure you have your paperwork in order. Understand the quotes you were provided with, ask questions about charges you don’t understand BEFORE the project is underway, and always sign off on changes you request. It’s very easy in the heat of the project for both designers and business owners to become careless about the paper trail, but when the dust has cleared and the bills come in, you want to be sure that you understand what you are paying for, and that you are satisfied with the results. The time you spend in the planning stages is vital to the final level of satisfaction.
I am the first one to admit that none of these steps is extraordinary when it comes to business planning, and yet I find that many business owners overlook them in the construction of their own website. Whether it is because they are too busy to bother, or that they don’t seem to see their websites as a priority in their business model I am unsure. What I do know is that when these basic business principles are applied to website design, both clients and designers find both great satisfaction and accomplishment with the end result.
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