With the best designer to work on your website, the next thing is to bring them on board and work together. Why are some web projects successful than others? One of the best approaches to ensure you get the best results is to focus on the relationship you create with your web designer. In this piece, I’ll share a few tricks and tips on how to create a collaborative client-web designer relationship, towards ensuring a successful web project.
- Communicate your goal clearly
Be clear and precise right from the start. What is the single most important thing you want your website to do? Ensure that a designer fully understands your scope and what your business requires. With a good collaboration environment, the Website Designer will have the confidence to tell you when your ideas are not working for the business. A collaborative and full-focus relationship ensures the best possible outcome.
- Know what you’re paying for
Once you provide them with a detailed project scope, and they agreed to deliver the best solutions possible, a next step is a contract. Here, there is itemized calculation of each module that’s meant to be in the project and the cost of each task involved. Make sure there is nothing left to guess here. Read the contract scrupulously, since anything that is not in that agreement will definitely cost you extra.
- Focus on the scope, not solutions
You are the website owner and not the designer. It is therefore important to clearly stick to your respective roles. Try to identify the problems and leave the designer to solve them. At times you may hinder the web designer from suggesting alternative solutions that might be even better than what you are recommending.
- Do not rush the process
Creating an exceptional website truly takes time. At times you would wish the project to be done within a few weeks. Maybe your company requires the website up to resume normal operations.. However, the designer requires time to weigh different options, and execute different approaches to fit the business. The longer you give your web designer to code and polish up, the better the outcome.
- Stay involved and insist on seeing work in progress
Programmers have this habit of coding in secrecy. Be involved in each module of the project, collaborate to assess the preliminary blueprint, reviewing prototypes, and finally participate in the usability testing. If the web designer happens to misunderstand the initial brief he could spend weeks, working on a totally irreverent design.
Trust that you’ve got the best developer for your system. Give them some peace of mind to exercise their talents without necessarily micromanaging them. Stay involved keeping good communication throughout. A website is never done completely. Continue with your client-web designer collaboration even after your site has gone live.