Nobody likes watching his money, his time and his efforts doomed to waste. Despite that, we are having more and more waste in our web space. Millions of unobserved websites, unvisited pages, unexplored features and unnoticed products, they all together show that most of them were outcomes of unplanned, unwitted and uninteresting imitation. What follows is nothing but all players including users, designers and clients suffer together, and suffer much.
With this situation always hankering ahead, it’s worth spending time in understanding the project in its all aspects, its all opportunities, its all challenges. It’s important to understand the project holistically which will help avoiding costly errors later.
To get a better start, here comes a checklist for designers, to help them better understand the project and arrange the best results for the clients.
Define the Budget Honestly
This is where clients and web design company need to be most fair and honest to each other. Knowing or defining the budget helps both parties draw a capacity line for the project as it defines what practically can be achieved with that very sum of money and what cannot be. Frankly speaking, it’s all about ‘you get what you pay for’; particularly in web design and development.
Specify Design Requirements, Before you Start the Project
Sometimes clients stream in their new range of requirements at the time when their work is already well underway, and disturb the whole work flow and project timeline. It’s mostly related to the clients who have no clear idea of the work load and ask for rough time/cost estimates. It’s almost same as asking construction architect to quote for your house without telling him how many rooms you want in.
When such inquiries are addressed with automated proposals and generic quotes, the results are always frightening. We, the design and development companies too need to understand our professional responsibilities and need to educate clients about their real opportunities and challenges regarding their projects.
Once clients brief about their project, It’s far better to define how much work will be needed, and how it will be needed.
Set the Design Objectives
Every web design company takes pride in meeting up with clients’ expectations. But sometimes… Sometimes things are not easy at all.
Design is not just piling up delightful visuals and nor is it doing colorful polishes to some layouts. It has some actions to perform, some jobs to fulfill, some objectives to meet. Knowing these objectives is crucial for successful design product. Clients must brief web designers what objectives they want their design to perform and likewise designers must also seek for functions that their product is going to do.
Know the rule, your duty is to meet clients’ needs. Period.
Know the Audience meant for your Design
Being playwright and being designer involves many things similar and common. Both need to know whom their work is meant for, better put as target audience. They need to know their demographics as their age group, their class favorites and taboos, their qualifications and all that follows. It’s important. Isn’t it? Knowing this audience allows us to understand the scope of our design work at length. Once target market is known, design would ultimately be easily customized and tailored to meet up expectations of those viewers.
Practical Deadlines are Great
Defining deadlines for any work are necessary as they are critical for better time management, provided that they are practical. Even for the work that isn’t urgent, it must be laid bound to some time limits. A work that is systemized, summarized and organized logically has always far reaching influence.
Practical Deadlines!
Stream In Content and Image, to avoid time lapses
Any existing images that client wants to be fitted in design work must be given in decent and easily modifiable formats. For example if client wants to have his company/brand logo to be fitted in ad or brochure etc, he must provide it in vector format such as (.ai) or (.eps). JPEG is not a vector format and thus does not support to considerable resizes.
Now for Content! Before the design work starts, all the written content and images in their final form must be made available to the client. Often designer kicks off right away with the little information that’s available to him and soon after he has nothing to do but wait for other necessary pieces. Such time lapses can be pressing at times, so it must be made clear that client must himself be responsible for any revisions or modifications.
Though this is an extensive list and can be extended to tens of other paragraphs yet for first client meeting, this list would work considerably well. Well, what additions would you like to make to this list?
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