I love what I do and I've been fortunate to have the best clients who know what they want and trust me to create it for them. To get the best professional website that reflects your personality it's important to have a good working relationship with your web designer. Here are four tips that will help your designer create a website you will love.
Know Yourself and your Business
You want your website to be a reflection of you and your business. Coming in with a good sense of your values, mission, audience and brand gets the project off on the right foot. A good designer will ask all the right questions so they understand your vision. Although it takes time and effort on your part, your answers to these questions will set the foundation for your site.
Speaking of Time and Effort...
This is a partnership. To get the most out of this relationship you'll have to put in some work. Be prepared to:
Be clear with your ideas
Respond to questions and requests for content in a timely manner
Take the time to review, read and edit
Give constructive feedback
Trust
Trust the person you hired to do the job. It's hard to give up control, but it's good to have fresh eyes on your project. Being precious about an old design or old ideas will hinder progress. Listen to your designer's recommendations and take the time to think about them. Share your ideas, be involved, give plenty of feedback, but in the end, trust that you and your designer have the same goal and they will do what is best for your business and your brand.
Some Don'ts (straight talk)
Don't ask for input from a bunch of people who are not involved in your business. Every choice has been well thought-out by your designer and your friends and family may not know the reasons behind those decisions. I know it's tempting to get other opinions, but hearing, "My mom doesn't like this color," or "My friend thinks we should use another font," can damage a good relationship with your designer. Your mom isn't in this partnership (I told you this was straight talk).
Don't assume what your designer does is easy or simple. Each step of the process takes much longer and is more involved than you might think. As an example, changing one thing usually means changing a bunch of other things that are related to that piece of the puzzle, but you will only see the one change.
Don't rush the process. Rushing will lead to mistakes and sloppy work. Your designer will look at your website, and then look at it again, click on everything 100 times, take a break and then look at it again. The next day they will look at it again and find something they missed. Give your designer the time they need to design, evaluate, test and edit so that you will have a quality outcome.
Don't micromanage. Tell your designer about problems, but don't offer solutions. Share your ideas, but don't insist on doing it your way. If you have a good designer, they will value what is important to you and use that to guide their decisions.
