Empowering Clients Through Terrific Web Design
A company or school’s website is its online storefront. What is important to you? What is your look and feel? Is your identity clear? All of these things are answered within seconds of visiting a website and the user experience can determine success or failure almost immediately.
At 38 House, designing and working on engaging websites is one of our core skills. We’ve worked on and built websites in a variety of industries. Every client (and their reader, customer, or client) dictates different design needs, different platform needs, user experiences, and much more. Every build is a unique project that starts with a series of thoughts and questions. Here are some elements that you should consider if approaching a new website build or a redesign of an existing site.
Choosing the Right Content Management System (CMS)
What type of company are you? If you’re a school, what is your existing school management software? If you’re an e-commerce business, what is your payment processing system? Are you simply hanging a “digital shingle” for your small business? Each one of these answers will help determine the right CMS for you and choosing correctly is key. You want a system that will grow with you and allow you to pivot and shift.
What Level of Involvement to Do You Want As a Client?
You’ll have as much input as you want into the creation process of the website, but once it is completed, how much involvement do you want in the ongoing maintenance of the site? You may want to add and edit content on the website. You may want to do all of that, plus security and infrastructure updates. You may want to pass all of that onto a third party like 38 House. Regardless, it’s something you should think about.
I have worked with companies who couldn’t add or change a single element of their website without third-party help. I’ve seen others who were happy to outsource all of their website work. In addition to adding/updating content that users see, websites often need security updates and other upgrades to keep them running in top shape. Communicate your desired level of involvement to the designer at the start of the project.
Once your website launches, there will be weeks or months of tweaking and improving. Someone should monitor Google Analytics to see what’s working, what’s not working, and what to change. If you don’t have someone in house who can make those changes, be sure to budget for that work post-launch.
One Last Thought… Manage Your Files
One of the key elements of a good user experience is website speed. Your pages have to load fast, and that’s especially true for users on their phones. Many things affect website speed, from the CMS to your web hosting, but the lowest-hanging fruit is managing file size. Make sure that from the beginning of a website project, your photos, videos, PDFs, and any other files on your website and compressed and optimized for the web. We’ve helped a company resize and compress every single image on their very large content site years after launch. It’s laborious and frustrating. Start as you mean to go on.
There are many more decisions involved in building a website than the few I’ve outlined here, but I hope you’ve found these helpful. These items are key for empowering you, the client, during the web design/building process. Take your time to make these decisions up front and you’ll be glad you did down the line.
