Getting the Best Value From Your Design Firm
Have you decided to launch a new website or revamp your existing one? Hiring a design firm can be transformational for your small business. It can also be frustrating, spendy and time consuming if you’re not strategic. The most important part of any website design process is the preparation time you spend up front.
Here are 5 tips for getting the most value out of your design firm dollars:
1. Get clear on your goals
When I sit down with a new client, my first question is always: what do you need to accomplish? If I get squishy answers or the conversation immediately turns to colors and fonts, I know I can send the designers/programmers back to the office for a while.
Whether you’re selling commercial products & services, recruiting students to a private high school, or soliciting donations for a nonprofit organization—you have business goals. Write out a detailed website requirements document that frames your goals as measurable outcomes you want to achieve. Obviously your website isn’t the sole solution to all those challenges (You already know this.). BUT, armed with a clear picture of what you’re trying to do enables the design firm to give you the full benefit of their team’s expertise. The design team will likely suggest or recommend approaches you may not have considered.
Plan to document and discuss your business in detail with the design firm. This will shape website visual design, user interface and functionality.
Need help with requirements documentation? Check out Alex O’Byrne’s blog on How to Write a Website Specification or VitalDesign’s Writing a Website Design Document?.
2. Define and Refine your Target Audience
Your website reveals A LOT about your company. Savvy customers can SEE and EXPERIENCE how well you understand their needs and wants. Information presentation, the ease or bother of doing transactions, the accessibility of real humans and even corporate values on community relationships—it all adds up into a user experience you want to influence. But, you have to know your target market/audiences.
Here’s where your market research gets put to use. For example, if your target market is seniors, your design firm may recommend larger size fonts, giving users the ability to change font size easily, or even to have an audible option or explainer videos instead of or in addition to text. If, for example, you’re targeting millennials, the design team will focus on highly visual and mobile friendly design, mechanisms for customers to review products, and social media integration.
Just getting started and want more information about market segmentation? Read Mandy Porta’s blog article on How to Define Your Target Market at Inc.
For businesses with existing websites, your site analytics, social media analytics, and customer service data are the best and most targeted market research tools at your disposal. Mine these resources for insight on how users find your site, move through the content, how long they explore your content and where they leave. Include what you’ve learned in your requirements document.
If you have analytics data but you’re not sure what it all means, this is where a good design firm can really add value. Their analytics guru can help you understand your customer behavior better. Depending on the services the design firm offers, they can also customize your analytics dashboards so that it better reflects your specific business, and captures the data you really need. Plus, you can learn how to track and measure the effectiveness of specific advertising or outreach campaigns.
3. Decide Who Gets to Decide
It’s important for the right business stakeholders to be involved in website development, to give input along the way, and to test and review the site during development. You should also identify up front who has the final say for the project. This will save you headaches later on. The ‘decision maker’ can be an individual or a subset of your overall team. Often it is the lead marketing person, the website/social media content specialist, and your server administration person—if you have on-staff IT support.
Here’s why it’s important to decide who gets to make the final call. When everyone’s opinion is equal, you risk too many compromises and an end product that is just plain mediocre. And it just takes forever—which costs you money. At the other end of the spectrum, when only one person’s opinion counts, it’s often the highest-paid-person-in-the-room (aka The Boss)—whether that individual has marketing experience or not. What sometimes happens is The Boss comes in towards the end of the project and starts making wholesale changes—without the benefit of the learnings that came out of the planning, scoping, research and conversations that have already taken place with the design firm. This is expensive and frustrating for everyone involved.
So thoughtfully decide who should really “own” your business’ online presence—in the short term and the long term. Then empower that team or individual, and communicate their role to your design firm and the larger stakeholder team.
4. Get Organized
If you’re just starting out with your small business, figuring out what content you actually need to create can feel overwhelming and hard to define—especially if you don’t have a marketing background. But, your design firm cannot give you feedback with nothing to evaluate. Draft some copy as a starting point so you can best leverage their advice. Depending on the services your design firm offers, they may also be able to assist with photography, videography and copy writing. If not, you may need to commission other expertise.
If you already have a website, inventory the written content, photography and video assets. No one knows your business the way you do (Except maybe your competitors. Stay calm.). You are in the best position to make determinations such as Keep, Discard or Needs Revising. Doing this inventory and assessment BEFORE you engage a design firm will save you time and money. It may also stimulate ideas that should be included in your requirements document.
Sometimes businesses want the design firm to do the inventory and assessment. This can potentially be valuable in helping the design firm to deeply understand your business and processes. But it can also be expensive—so choose how you want to invest your dollars.
5. Be a Good Customer
Explore your competition and gather examples of websites or functionality you like. It’s also helpful to identify websites outside of your business niche as well, as this helps your design firm understand what you like and why. That said, don’t fall in love with a photography site if your business is accounting and payroll! Your website should feature content that authentically evolves out of your business activities. Stay focused on what is unique about your business niche in order to end up with a website you can maintain and sustain.
Do your part of the work. On schedule. Write, revise or migrate your copy to the draft site. Ensure wireframes and design mockups are reviewed and signed off on time. Thoroughly test all of the website features. And, be mindful of the number of review cycles included in your design firm’s project quote. If you need more review cycles, the project cost will go up.
Watch out for scope creep. It’s pretty typical for new ideas to pop up as a website starts to take shape. Discuss whether such ideas need to be incorporated into the site now or later. If you genuinely need it now, the new task will increase the project cost and push back the launch deadline. Make those decisions carefully.
Remember that your website is an evolving tool that you will tweak and update as your business changes. It’s okay if you don’t have all the bells and whistles from day one.
Photography credit: Wireframe by Baldiri, through Creative Commons
Deborah Hill is an anthropologist and communications strategist who blogs about the ways humans and businesses interact. Her professional work has included science writing and implementing communications strategies for Higher Ed departments and schools. Her consulting work supports the development of small businesses.