This article is going to reveal some of the most misunderstood concepts when it comes to website design. Most entrepreneurs have been ripped off their hard earned money because they don’t know these basic things.
In a previous post, we explained why every business should get a website and the cost for setting one up, but what you would be reading today would give you an edge when next you need to negotiate for a website design project.
STEPS
Getting a website off the ground requires certain things and most people ignore these things and that’s why they loose money.
Here are the steps you should take for any web design project:
1. Know what you want:
You will agree with me that most persons seeking to get a website don’t really know what they want. They just want to dump the responsibility on the web designer.. my question is this, how do you measure the success of a project when you don’t know what success looks like.
You should first take time to discover what you want to achieve. You can do that by asking yourself some of the questions below:
- What do I want to achieve with my website? Brand trust, increase sales, communication with customers, etc.. the answer to this question tells you what your main reason for getting the website should be and how you would position yourself. If you don’t have a goal in sight your website would be largely useless. Take my word for it! And don’t try to have many goals, I advice you stick with 2 or 3 to see effectiveness. You can increase your goals in future when you fully understand what you are doing.
- What features do I need on my website to achieve my goal? After discovering why you want a website in the first place, then you can proceed to discover what features would help you achieve your goals. If you want to increase customer connection a blog would be needed, if you want more sales then pricing tables, e commerce or call booking features are essential and so on. So you can see that it’s your overall goal that determines the features you would need, then you would discover that you don’t need all the features in the proposal you got from the web agency near your street. Knowing the right features you need helps your website stay simple, effective and amazingly cheaper to build and maintain (the lesser the features the developer has to include, the lower the cost for the project).
Finally I advice you plan the way your website should look by drawing wire-frames before hiring a website designer.
2. Purchase your domain & hosting yourself:
This is usually confusing for most persons but here is my warning
WARNING: ALWAYS PURCHASE YOUR DOMAIN & HOSTING YOURSELF
Not only would you get it for cheaper, you would not have any reason to worry if you stop working with a particular web designer in future.
When purchasing a domain or hosting account make sure you are buying from a reliable provider, for factors like security, frequent updates and customer support, I recommend you use
bluehost . I have used it for some projects in the past and it’s a great place to start.
3. Hire a freelancer not an agency:
For many of us the harsh economy in Africa makes us desire the best value for our money.
When it comes to website design and programming, I honestly believe that web agencies do a better job, because I used to run one before , however most of the work and tools needed for a business websites are accessible by freelancers, in the same vein some agencies are just poor and slow to adapt to modern trends while freelancers are sleek and adventurous always seeking to master what’s in vogue.
This point answers the question of why we are here… at miduman we have built a platform where business owners can hire web designers on demand (online) without fear of losing money to fraud!
But If your project requires a lot of deep programming work, then I would advice against hiring an agency or even a freelancer and ask you to hire an in house team.
I am delighted you read to the end of this article, I would be giving the first 10 people to comment on this post 5% cashback for the next purchase they make on miduman.com valid until 1st of August.