Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance
Here are a few of the points I raise with new clients in order to assess their needs:
- What are your objectives?: Do you want to sell directly from you website or do you wish to use your website as an on-line brochure - producing leads to sell in a more traditional way?
- Determine a budget: You don’t need to spend thousands of pounds on your web design - but clearly a budget of £3,000 will create more than a budget of £1,000 or £500. Be realistic about what you are trying to achieve. Don’t expect an all-singing, all-dancing site if your budget is limited.
- Become familiar with the web: Spend some hours ’surfing’ the net and ‘bookmark’ sites you like the design of and show these to me. From a designers point of view, knowing what a client likes can save a lot of time and is a great help in stimulating discussion and preventing misunderstandings.
- Is your market local, national or global?: The Internet will work differently for you depending on your market reach. Top Search Engine positioning will not be such a great priority if your market is local, as most of your web visitors will come via local more traditional advertising. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that a ‘lower quality’ site will do. Your visitors will still judge you against all the sites they visit - so you still need an easy to use / navigate website with a professional feel.
- Determine a deadline: Be realistic. No developer with a full work schedule will be able to drop everything else to work on your site. However if you want a site urgently, let me know. I can usually have a modest site up and running within the week which can then be registered with Search Engines, however 6 - 8 weeks is a more realistic time scale. During the development period I will load your site on to a temporary server where you can view it on a daily basis.
- Search Engines: Like any good website developer I can show evidence of success in placing sites high in the Search Engines.
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