10 Crucial Questions to Ask Before Doing a Website Project
Properly preparing for a website design / redesign will help define the project and avoid hiccups along the way. By first hashing out a specific plan for your website, you can make sure your project stays on-course throughout.
The Basics
1. Why do you need to redesign your website?
Define what has caused you to make the leap and convey that to the web design team you’ll be working with; that way, they get a sense of what inspired you to start from scratch.
2. What need or business goals do you have for your website that aren’t being met by the current version?
Is your current website failing to keep visitors’ attention?
Are your conversion rates too low?
Is the site too hard to update?
Find out why your current website is unsatisfactory to truly understand the need for a new one.
3. What goals do you want your website to achieve?
This step is the exact opposite of the one before—find those failures that the current website is causing, then determine what needs to happen with the new website to consider it useful to your brand strategy and customers.
4. What is the function of having a website for your brand?
Every brand these days should have a website, sure, but it can’t just be a pretty thing that aimlessly floats in cyberspace.
It has to have a specific purpose in order to properly serve your brand—be it to inform visitors about your brand or allow them to make a purchase.
And remember, your website serves your customers, not you, so always keep them top of mind when establishing the function the site will serve.
5. What will visitors accomplish on your website?
Here, you can hash out even more specifically what it is that your site does; try to get down to the details of every function and feature if possible.
6. What kind of website does your brand need?
Are you selling products online? That would require building on an ecommerce platform; on the contrary, a website with a member portal is an entirely different beast.
Are people subscribing to an online publication, or does your brand just need a basic website that only gets as technical as a contact form?
These differences will entail different features and platforms that need to be identified from the start.
7. Who is the website for?
One of the most important steps is identifying your ideal audience and anticipated visitors by demographic data, tech-savviness, intent, personal goals and pain point, the stage of their purchase decision making, and more.
If you don’t yet have researched and clearly identified buyer personas, that would be the best place to start.
8. How will you measure success?
Come up with SMART goals, both long- and short-term, to determine the success of the new website—think about what’s important to measure, like traffic, sales, or subscriptions.
9. What image, look, or feel do you want your brand’s website to portray?
In our own website design process, this question helps guide our designer to more efficiently create a website that works both for you and your customers. Should you already have an established brand the answer should be completely inline with the same style and vibe. This is why branding is a must for any website design project.
Without this, the design possibilities are endless, so define what you do and don’t want your future website to portray to ensure that you are in love with the final outcome without having to try out a whole host of designs, as most agencies have a limit on the number of concepts presented.
Remember to consider the balance of user experience and design so that your website is neither difficult to navigate nor ugly.
10. When analyzing your competitors’ sites, what do you like and not like about their websites?
This is an important step in further clarifying your site’s personality and features; it also provides reference for the web design team to more clearly see the vision in your head and bring it to life.
Take the websites you love and the websites you hate, then lay out a clear explanation of why for both cases.
