Before web designers start working on their projects and they start designing websites for their clients they too have the right to clear all their doubts from their clients. Not every time your client is supposed to question you. You can also ask them your queries in order to serve them with the best designs. Well by asking your queries you are actually helping them because if you are not clear about what they are asking for then how come you will deliver them the best?
But, the difference between a successful and an average website designer is that a successful designer always follow step by step process and keep on asking questions from their clients in order to serve them with the best possible results. This helps them in making a very clear insight about the designs and the projects they have to work upon. All this will ultimately provide you with result driven website.
Well I have a list of 7 different questions that a web designer should ask to their clients in order to design a user friendly and attractive websites for their clients’ customers.
Q# 1: What are the goals and mission of your Business?
By asking this question designers generally get aware of what the basic idea of the business is and what the major goal that they want to achieve is. This will help a designer in understanding how serious you are for your business and how seriously he has to perform for your business. By understanding their basic goals, a web designer come to know that where the client is actually seeing his business heading in the next upcoming years. You will also come to know about some other goals of their business, apart from their financial growth.
As far as the values are concerned you need to understand your work ethics and have to make efforts that will make your clients’ business to expand. In terms of mission you have to understand what specific purpose you are supposed to fulfill for his/her business.
Q# 2: Do you want your website to achieve the same goal and have the same values?
A website is defined as the online representation of your client’s business and they always prefer to project the same values and want their goals to be consistent with their business’s goals. But sometimes it happens that a client wants to change the perception about their business. Some want to make their old business contemporary in the market of the younger audience while some want to lend their business providing some more credibility. If not this there are also some people who want to rebrand their business completely. When a web designer as such question, this means that you are setting a stage for your client and asking them the actual purpose of their website and their business.
Q# 3: For whom are you preparing this website or who are your potential customers?
It is very obvious that you are not targeting everybody in this whole world. You have some specific sort of customers defined whom you want to offer your services. But who are they? What is the age group of your target audience? What financial bracket are they falling into? What are their basic interests and their preferences? Why your clients should think that your services are beneficial for them? Is your client looking for simple audience or the broader audience?
The success or failure of any website mainly depends on how well you can cater the needs of your potential audience. In order to cater their needs, you also need to understand the demographic characteristics of your potential audience. Who else can give you a better detail about your target audience than your client?
Q# 4: How are you going to measure the success of your business?
Ask your client how he is going to judge the success and the failure of a website? Well this is a very important question because at the end he is the person who has to enjoy the success or suffer the pains. So when your client says that he will evaluate the success of the website by the number of people who will ask for the services he is offering, make sure that you craft all the “Call-to action” buttons in such a way that they should influence people to click on them right away.
But if your client says that he is going to judge the success and failure by revenue generation, a web designer can always make a design that will convince the buyer to buy products from that website only.
Q# 5: Do you have any preferences for your website design?
If you are having your clients with you or near you they will always have some suggestions to offer. They will definitely give you some ideas on how they want their website to look like. In fact this will help you in having a clear idea about how they want you to shape up their website.
Sometimes if your luck is not with you, you meet up with some confused clients who want everything in their website but still have some limitations. They will definitely make you go crazy. They don’t know anything but want everything to be latest. These types of clients you can handle by offering them with some flat web designs and integrating them with some retro elements. Make sure that being a web designer you are adhered to your basic principles and will do a lot more to make them satisfied.
Well you have to explain them each and everything why you are doing what you are doing and what benefit are they going to have with the steps that you are taking for designing their websites. This is actually their right and you have to answer them with their basic doubts.
Q# 6: What is the USP of your website that you wish to project?
You will find that there are some websites that are popular because they are offering solid, reliable and useful information to their visitors. There are some websites that are trusted only because they deliver the latest and true information to their visitors. There are some websites which are guaranteed for delivering best services in their niche. A website won’t be able to work without a USP which is called as Unique Selling Propositions and this is the main reason why people visit websites. Well being a designer it is not your job to design the USP of the project website.
Q# 7: How often do you want your web designer to appraise you with the progress of the project?
Well there are clients who want to get updated for their project status on everyday basis but this won’t be an easy job for a web designer to keep on updating them on regular basis. This is not a bad thing but sometimes it makes a web designer feels really irritated because you are not bound to your client, you are only bound to serve best. So make sure to ask this question if your client is not asking you for every day update. This will help you in setting up a clearly defined channel for communication and will also keep the client involved in what all is happening with the project.
These are those seven questions that will help you in understanding your clients in much better way and will make you clear about their ideas and expectations they are having from you.
