Starting a Web Design Project
Getting your business’ first website up and running can be an exciting endeavor, but as with any online project, proper planning is always required. Every website needs to strike a balance between form, functionality, and purpose. You can help your designers and developers accomplish this balance by answering the following questions before you start the project.
What are Your Goals?
The first question has less to do with design and more to do with helping us understand your company. Telling us about your company’s goals will help us understand what you want and what type of features meet your requirements. An e-commerce website, for example, might require us to develop customized online shopping functionalities, while an informative healthcare website might require us to install a content management system (CMS) that allows them to publish their own content easily.
Do You Have Existing Brand Designs?
Your company’s branding helps your customers and prospects remember who you are and what you can do, and gives your company a distinct identity. You need to let your designers know if you already have specific logo design or color scheme for your brand so they can integrate it into your website’s design.
If you don’t have any existing branding for your company yet, let us know and we’ll develop it based on your company’s business goals and personality.
Who is Your Target Audience?
Your website’s design and functionality shouldn’t only be about what you want. It’s important to know your own target market and ideal customers if you want to come up with a website that captivates them and encourages them to act on your call to action.
Instead of limiting your descriptions to statistics like age and gender, you can simply describe your ideal customer as an individual. Telling us that you’re targeting males aged 18-25 that enjoy art is less descriptive than saying that you’re targeting that guy who has a college degree and often attends exhibit openings at a particular local gallery. The more specific you get the better!
Who are Your Competitors?
Tell us who your competitors are, and we can size them up for you. Knowing what you’re up against is a good way to make sure your website will help you achieve your business’ goals. We’re not encouraging you to copy your competitors’ online strategy, but you can definitely learn a lot from your competitor websites’ strengths and weaknesses. If your competitor website is missing a crucial feature that their users would find useful, you can enhance your own website by making sure to include that feature from the start.
Whether we’re taking on a small business website design project or a more complex project for a large e-commerce company, our job is to make sure our goals are perfectly aligned with yours. We can certainly offer our own recommendations for your website, but we always pay attention to your requests and specific business needs. Answering the questions above can help you build a solid foundation for your web design project, and staying open to our follow-up questions and suggestions can help us build the perfect website for your company.