If you are thinking of improving your website, considering a website redesign, or even starting from the ground up getting your ducks in a row before hiring an agency or designer can help could help make your initiative a success.
Make no mistake, I’m not suggesting you need to present your agency with all this information on day one, just giving you a sense of things we will be interested to know before getting started. My own little insiders guide!
Budget
Deciding the amount of funds you can allocate to your website improvement project is an important first step. It will be a first question of many firms and if you know that number up front it can help expedite the project and conversely could waste you considerable time barking up the wrong tree of agencies that aren’t the right fit.
Goal
What are you trying to accomplish with this website redesign project? If there are many answers to this one try to prioritize what is most important to you. Helping to identify the end game will also help you gauge success.
Measuring Success
Once you understand why you are taking the project on in the first place it will be easier to understand whether the team has done a good job or not after you launch. Are you trying to increase donations, increase attendance at an event or boost leads? Whatever they are, goals will likely inform how you measure success.
Scale
Sounds pretty straightforward, but there are many ways to tackle website improvements. Are you tweaking, augmenting, completely overhauling, or focusing on a few particular areas? Presenting your expectations clearly in terms of the process and the deliverables you are expecting to your designer ahead of time is important.
Techy or No Techy?
Do you have a technical person on your team that can serve as an advisor or help with coordination of technical items or things that are outside of yours and your web development teams’ wheelhouse? Remember, your web team is not your IT department so having someone you can call (and get a callback) that is already on your team or a freelance consultant is important. Don’t wait to find this person when and if you need this them. Usually that is too late.
Can I Please Speak to the Manager?
Have you dedicated a person to lead the project and to correspond with the agency? Having too many cooks kitchen is confusing and a time waster.
A Question of Content
Don’t forget about this little guy. Just kidding! Content development can often take the longest of all elements to produce and certainly to get approved. Keep that in mind when you start the project. Who will be the keeper of the content on your end and how will you manage approvals, versioning, and delivery of it. Ok, that is a blog post in and of itself…. But seriously, you don’t have to know all these answers, but it is a conversation that should be taking place with your designer so thinking through how these things usually work within your organization’s culture is important and if you don’t get the question be sure to ask what the process will look like.
User Testing
Approvals and testing won’t fall into one person’s lap…let’s hope. Think through who your trusted, diversified, smallish group will be when it comes to testing new ideas and who will have the “final say”. If there are certain testing expectations you have that should be communicated in the beginning because that is a whole strategy piece that can run the gamut in terms of how far you go with it.
Purpose of your Website Improvements
Why? Why? Why the heck are you doing this. Need I say more?
Trust
Think through whether you fully trust the person/people you are hiring. Are they reliable? Are they a good fit? Will they do what it takes to give the project legs or are you small potatoes? I have seen and heard awful stories about people being burned by their web designers, whether they dropped off the grid or had bigger fish to fry it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, this is your most important marketing and communications tool and it not only needs to work, it needs to look professional and sound professional.
Analytics
This is an obvious thing to most, but if you currently have a website and don’t have analytics hooked up to the pages, stop what you are doing and install Google Analytics right now and then measure traffic for a couple of months at least before diving into the next iteration.
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