Although my core experience and expertise is in web marketing, I keenly participate and follow up in the process of web design and development because successful web marketing relies so heavily on website design and development.
As a web marketing firm, we too often have requests from customers to optimise sites and not so surprising but many have poor design, bad coding and non-standard development. There is an awareness to be spread amongst website owners who seriously use website as an important business asset. The process of design and development must be streamlined and planned to make marketing more effective. It’s a hard job to promote poorly designed website with non-standard code development. Even though they may achieve high rank, it’s going to be still difficult to get good conversion as it’s likely to have high bounce rate.
The success of a website is statistically measured by revenue generation or goal conversion. The most effective strategy would be to the work out a detailed approach right from branding, designing, functionality development to web marketing. It’s so important to have an extremely user friendly and well-designed website. Otherwise your marketing would fail if your website gives poor presentation.
So in light of these we have compiled a list of few very important questions which needs to be asked and should be used in laying out a scope for a website development project.
Remember that the purpose to ask questions should be:
- To grasp detailed understanding of business and their target audience and to understand the business goal of your client.
- To produce a website that is accurate enough in meeting client expectations financially as well as helping them to have a good reputation online.
- To build a website which can be effectively marketed to achieve expected results and elegantly presenting client business's core vision and principles.
Very important questions to ask before working out website development scope and quote.
- Give details about target audience like gender, region, age, language, qualifications, interest, and industry etc.
- What is the business purpose of website and what would you like to achieve through this web development project?
- What are your business values and how do you normally express them to your customers and other visitors?
- Who are your competitors and how do you make yourself different from them?
- Do you like any websites and have a style/theme in your mind like colour combinations, layout, functionality etc?
- Do you currently have a website? If yes then What do you like and dislike about it?
- Where is your website hosted and do you have full access to it with important information like c-panel and FTP logins?
- Do you have any other team or contractors who will be part of the web development?
- How much budget do you have?
- Do you have correct server with sufficient space, bandwidth, databases, etc. capable to provide essential infrastructure to the website you intend to build?
- Do you have company branding done like logo? If yes then would you like to see any changes in your branding?
- Do you have content prepared for the website or would like to get our help for content creation?
- Can you give example and more information about type of content and volume of content? Do you want to use content to be imported from existing website?
- Do you need ongoing SEO services and have any keywords in mind for which you'd like to see your website rank high in search engines?
- Do you need responsive website which is optimized for mobile devices?
- Do you need Content Management System and Ecommerce shopping cart with payment facility?
- Do you need a blog?
- Will your team require training for making essential website updates and content publishing?
- Do you require fluid-width or fixed-width website front end development?
- What is the timeline expectation for development of this project?