Full disclosure: I sell sites. Every day, I meet with businesses searching for web designers, and naturally, I would like several of them to choose us.
But I have also noticed something during these conversations: often, folks do not ask the most important questions.
A meeting with a web design company is an interview. You need to make certain their business is actually genuine, and you need to get yourself a sense of the business’s personality and culture.
Most of all, you have to understand the approach to the unique challenges you are tackling with the project yours.
In five minutes, these five questions are going to tell you more than an hour-long presentation could:
Question one: What’s the approach to usability?
More than any other question, this will help you easily differentiate between experienced web designers and novices.
Asking about usability will help you understand the company’s focus – namely, whether or perhaps not they have the most important issue in mind: the visitor.
A company without an excellent answer to this could put together a website they like, or perhaps one you like, but that visitors find confusing or perhaps difficult to work with. It would help if you had a web design firm that thinks of probably the highest level: user-centered design.
The most effective folks working in web design today will light up when you mention usability. They will be grateful for the question, and they will be happy to share their experience and opinions latest research.
Best Answer:
“I am thrilled you asked! We feel in user-centered design, and we conduct usability testing whenever possible. We are visitor advocates and will defend the interests of theirs with concrete evidence and research.”
Question two: Can you show me examples of projects with goals that are similar?
Ask for examples of sites with goals that are similar and features.
Need an event registration tool? Talk to folks who could teach you one. This way, you can ask why it was created in a particular way, what the problems were, what results have been measured, and how they met the project’s goals.
Suppose they have not made a similar site before. Are they upfront about it? Do they’ve some ideas? What challenges would they expect?
Is design your main concern? Instead of searching for a firm with a portfolio piece that appears to fit your needs, look for a business that could teach you a broad range of designs. This indicates a good creative philosophy: a company that listens to its clients considers the brand and does not take a one-size-fits-all approach to the design process.
Best Answer:
“Of course. Let us check out several now…”
Follow-Up Question:
Is there a limit to the number of design revisions?
Question three: Can I come across the team?
This question will instantly reveal whether the staff is outsourced or in-house.
A great deal of companies farm out the different areas of a task. Perhaps the firm you are thinking about is a dependable partner company. Or perhaps it is an ad hoc team of freelancers who have never worked together before – and who might not be there down the road.
Or perhaps could it be a group at all? The “company” you are speaking with could, in fact, be one person offering to promote the project, do the analysis, design the site, program it, and manage the server. Is it person very likely to be a pro in all those things?
For any site with serious goals, you need to search for a group of specialists. When the staff is actually, in fact, only one or perhaps two folks, ask about their capacity to manage the project yours. Can they be going to be busy selling new clients while working on your website? Exactly how important is the project of yours to them?
Best Answer:
“The entire team is actually in the house and works together on similar projects all the time.”
2nd-Best Answer: “There is actually a partner company involved, but everybody has worked together on similar projects.”
Follow-Up Question:
Have team members worked together before? How often have they done this?
Question four: What if I want to make changes later?
One of the more basic differences among web development firms is the approach to ongoing changes.
Every site is going to change over time. Some companies charge hourly for these changes, while others set up a content management tool that makes it simple, fast, and free to update text, upload images, and add pages.
Best Answer:
“We’re going to get a tool which lets you (or anyone with access) manage the website. You will never wait or perhaps get an invoice for basic changes.”
Follow-Up Question:
What kind of changes will cost money?
Even if your website includes a content management tool, some types of changes will require a professional coder or perhaps a designer. Ask whether your content management tool will allow you to add new forms, change animations, or perhaps create new types of page layouts.
Question five: How will we measure results?
It is not a terrible thing in case the answer to this question sounds a little technical.
Listen for terms like bounce rate, unique visits, page views, time on site, inbound links, search engine rankings, conversion rate, etc. When you start hearing jargon you are not familiar with, ask for explanations in simple English.
Best Answer:
“We measure unique visitors, bounce rate, and conversion percentage. Our goal would be to generate leads, so these’re probably the most important metrics. We work with an analytics tool to do this, and we are going to show you exactly how to track these measures as well.”