Do your clients have unclear or unrealistic expectations when they first approach you about a new web design/development project?
Esther Schindler’s excellent article Becoming Clueful: What You Should Know Before You Redo Your Web Site – Five tips on what businesses should expect from their web designers and developers covers many common client misconceptions.
Esther’s Tips:
- Understand what you want
- It costs more and takes longer than you think
- A Web site has several pieces. Don’t cut corners.
- Balance glitz and guts
- If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
- Avoid bit decay: the site needs maintenance
- Treat the Web team as professionals
You will see that there are actually 7 tips, not five as suggested by the title.
Roger Johannson added three tips of his own to Esther’s seven to come up with 10 things businesses should know before building a website
Roger’s Tips:
- Most people in the Web industry are clueless.
- You only get what you pay for.
- Don’t start your project with buying a CMS.
Roger was also inspired by Andy Budd’s 3 Things You Wish Clients Knew About the Web
My Tips:
Building on the above lists, some things that I find myself having to repeatedly explain are:
1. “It will take you far longer than you expect to write the content for your new site”.
A good way to avoid this problem is to hire in a copywriter to do this work, removing the burden from the client altogether. If you can get the client to agree to the additional expense, I highly recommend it.
2. “Photos taken by a professional photographer will be better than photos you take yourself, no matter how expensive and feature-packed your brand-new digital camera is”.
Photography is not a critical matter for some projects and it is often acceptable for a new site to use photos taken by the client.
However, for other sites photography is of paramount importance. In particular, it is essential to get top-quality product shots for e-commerce projects. Where necessary, always hire a professional.
3. “If you plan to launch your site at Event X or Trade Show Y, please give your web developer a reasonable amount of notice”.
Web development projects always take longer than your clients expect. It is unreasonable for a client to assume that a you can build an entirely new, all-singing, all-dancing site – from scratch – in just under a week, espscially if they are too busy to provide the required input. The solution? Always encourage clients to contact you as soon as possible.
What do you find yourself explainng to clients again and again?
