How to Find a Web Designer — 5 Valuable Questions

Key Takeaways

if you're planning a new website how do you know which web designer or agency should get your business I've got the five questions that will help you decide hey guys West McDowell here from the deep end and I know that one of the biggest concerns when getting a new website is who do you want to trust with the job you know with so many variables choosing the right web designer or agency can be overwhelming but there are a few questions that will help you clarify things a bit and let you know who's likely to bring real value and a really good ROI to your project okay so first up you want to ask how much time is spent on research and discovery okay I can't tell you how important a thorough discovery process is to any web project and these days almost every web designers a website will talk about how their results driven but then you ask them how much time is spent on it and they may come back to you saying you know we have a kick off me discovery meeting and that's about 30 minutes to an hour that's not enough time you know the discovery process needs to figure out as much as possible about your business and your customers and your competition so this is the phase where we find those little aha moments that give us the best ideas of all the clever ways we can find your customers online and also what needs to be included on the site to make them take action once they're there and that can only really happen with a more long-form conversation or better yet several conversations and then hours of research into your niche or market so the answer you're looking for is several hours at least with you and your team and anywhere from five to ten additional hours researching on their own okay and the next question is related to the first one and that is what kind of research will you do about our customers this one is so important because the starting point for any web designer should be knowing who the website is for and that's not for you it's for your customers so when you ask him this question they should tell you that they want to either see your customer avatars or help you create those if you don't already have them and if you're unfamiliar with a customer avatar it's really just marketing speak for a fictional character that represents your ideal customer like this or this without that important customer information they'll be going into the project blind it a minimum they'll need to know where your customers biggest concerns are your business can help them with what potential objections they might have to doing business with you and ultimately what's gonna motivate them to become a customer you know there's lots of ways they can research this with customer surveys or even going to sites like Yelp or Amazon and looking at relevant reviews that's either for your business specifically or even they can take a look at your competitors next on our list how do you approach the design process and this is a bit of an open-ended question but you're looking for two key phrases here you want to listen for a customer and usability focused okay you want to end up hiring a web designer who understands that the site needs to be designed to be easy to use for you guessed it your customers so as you listen to how they approach the design of a project you definitely want to hear that come up early in the conversation all right number four on our list how will my project be managed project management can not only mean the difference between staying on schedule or not but it also really impacts how well all the pieces fit together so in other words without some type of project management in place the site's goals can get lost along the way which compromises the success of the whole project now ideally you'll want to hear a few things you want them to talk about a specific program like Basecamp or a sauna that just keeps everything neatly in place you also want to hear them talk about regularly regularly scheduled sync meetings okay one of the biggest turning points for me as a web strategist was when we started those weekly sync meeting with our clients those consistent meetings increased productivity in a pretty major way it's allowed us to keep things moving much faster because every week we can go over any blockers and let our clients to know what's being worked on what's finished and what we're still waiting on from them so again ideally you want to know they use some type of project management program and that they'll meet with you to update you on a regular basis but your second-favorite response should just be some type of definitive answer that tells you they do have some kind of project management process in place if they fumble with that question if you can probably expect a lot of random email strings and things getting lost throughout the project okay we're almost done so I'll go ahead and give you number five and that is what services do you include now I'm not gonna tell you what you need to hear from them but you'll definitely want to know the answer if they're including everything but you don't need everything are you overpaying or what if they only provide design do you need to go somewhere else for the other parts of the project at the end of the day it's all about what you're comfortable with but keep in mind the more you need to go to multiple vendors for different parts of the project the more project management's gonna fall on you and in your lap so in a perfect world I'd recommend you work with a team who can provide the basic web strategy the messaging or copy that goes on the site and the design and development you may also want someone who can handle the digital marketing that you know drives traffic to the site once it's finished but here's the catch you only want all this from one provider if they're really good at all those skills so if you're dealing with one freelancer they probably won't be up-to-date enough on all of those things to be effective at any one of them so this really applies more to an agency or a team okay that's the list for more tips like these just subscribe to our channel or right down here and if you'd like to speak with me to see what we can do about getting you set up with a new strategy based website you can go to the deep end design.com i'm West McDowell with the deep end see you next time [Music]