I believe that creating and building the perfect business website requires a bit of team work. No matter how good your designer, they can only work with the information you provide. A good designer will ask A LOT of questions about your business and the more detail you can provide – the better.
Whilst it is the responsibility of the design team to meet the clients brief, realistically it just won’t happen first time every time.
As a business owner myself, I know how emotive buying a large ticket item like a website can be. However, team work is the key to success and here are some guides as to how to provide feedback.
- Providing feedback needs to be goal driven and therefore constructive. Including in your feedback a comment about how your son doing his A Levels could do better is not helpful.
- When I was a corporate bod I attended a HR training session, where I was made aware of the notion of a positive sandwich. The rule was that if you have something negative to say you should try and sandwich it between some positive information.
- Use a numbered list. A list of things you like, followed by a list of things you don’t like (and to finish on a positive you could include a nice thank you for the work so far!). Numbers are important to help track what points have been completed.
- If you are reviewing the very first proposal, do not be disappointed if it looks like a lot of things are wrong. If you are talking about small things like fonts, shades of green, moving things around – then this is a good sign.
- Remember it is very easy to “see” the things you don’t like in a design as these will stand out to you. Most probably you won’t even notice the elements that are spot on.
- If you have not worked on a website project before, give your designer opportunity to explain their design choices. Website design is very different from print. Colours don’t work in the same way, screen widths are all different, websites will look different on different browsers, there is a limited font selection, text can grow/shrink, SEO – and the list goes on. There may be some valid reasons for some of the design decisions so be prepared for a bit of a learning curve.
- Your website is not being designed for you. And this might be a bit of a shock – part of your designers brief will be to create a website that wins you more business. You might want an iPod inspired website – but be prepared to listen to your website designer when they explain that it might not be right for your hairdressing business.
- Feedback via email is often the most helpful. Requesting a face to face meeting might help, but nothing can beat written words. An email will provide a detailed list and work as a trail to track requests. Meetings can be time consuming and not always useful. I am sure you have left plenty of meetings before believing that you were all on the same page, only to find out later that you were no further forward. For me the perfect combination is a nice email followed by a call if there are issues to clarify.
- Try not to use the word “professional” as part of the brief or critique. The word professional is overused and not at all specific. You may mean corporate, shiny graphics, full featured and we had a client once who used it to mean that his clients would wear ties.
- If you have hired a website designer based on the strength of their portfolio, have some faith. If the design you see in front of you does not look like the quality of the portfolio then ask why.
- And lastly, do not expect the very first design iteration to be spot on. Our success record is about 80% which means that about 20% of the time we have significant revisions. This is completely fine and just part of the design process. Sometimes the designer will share their ideas with you early on in the process, to clarify colours and layout. At this stage the design can look a bit unpolished and empty.
I think 11 pointers is enough for now (although I can think of more!). In essence, there will always be a bit of team work involved in building a website and providing effective feedback is all part of the process.
