We usually get questions about our web design process from our prospective clients. Naturally they like to know what they’ll get from us before signing contracts. I usually send them this itemized list for a brief overlook. In this series of posts, I’m going to go into the details of these items. The first step of our web design process is the business objectives survey. Without this document, it’s almost impossible to create a great website serving a purpose. It answers the question “Why?” and helps us to find a better answer for the question “How?”. We can create a Pixar quality animation for your homepage, but if you’re trying to sell a service to CEOs it wouldn’t work (Yea, that was an exaggeration to make a point). We encourage our clients to be as specific as they can when they’re filling out our survey. Because more information about the goals, audience and competitors simply make us more powerful. After getting the answers from our clients, we distribute the survey to everyone involved in the project. Beside SEO experts and copywriters – who are expected to be more involved with this document -, we also distribute it to our graphic designers and UX designers and make sure that their creation is in line with the business objectives of the website. Our survey can be basically divided into three categories. In the first part of the survey, we basically try to learn what your website is going to be about and your goals with this website. In the second part, we try to get information about your audience. And the last part is about the competitors and collaborators. Let’s go into the details of these parts:
Your Website
Putting this information in writing helps us to understand the needs of the website better. As a result, we can address these needs in a better way in our design and create a better website. For instance, an eCommerce website may carry 200 different products but have a flagship product which leads to more revenue than other products combined. So we may decide to come up with some extras for that product’s page, or maybe a different template.
Your Audience
You know them better than us and probably better than anyone else. What do they want to see in the website? What do they like? Can you offer them something for free? Your answers to all these questions help us to find out the intersection points between your objectives and your users’ objectives. If we build your website focusing on this intersection, it helps to create quality traffic to your website with lower bounce rates.
Your Competitors
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Learning from others and transferring knowledge are the keys to progress. We should apply it to web design as well. Who are your competitors? What are they doing right and what are they doing wrong? This crucial information helps us to make your site better than the others.
Your Collaborators
Initially, we didn’t have questions about your collaborators in our business objectives survey. But the rising demand for SEO optimizations made us put this part in the survey. It’s just a start for our SEO efforts and if you decide to get our SEO package, you’ll get a more detailed survey. If you haven’t clicked it yet, here’s the link you can download our business objectives survey for free: Business Objectives Survey And after checking it out don’t forget to go to the next step: Design Objectives Survey
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