By Jim Clanin
Many small businesses start with a ‘starter’ website that acts as an online business card that shows business hours, contact information and basic details about the business. Eventually, as businesses grow they reach a point where they require a professionally designed website that reflects their business, culture, products or services, and that provides a professional online appearance. Unlike your first website where you may have had a friend of a friend’s cousin design it for $500, you’ll find yourself needing to work with an experienced and professional website designer to help you get the website you and your customers expect from your business. Here are six tips to help you when working with a website designer.
1. Do your research: Much like choosing new paint colors and accents for your kitchen or a new hair style, know what you like before you start thinking about your new website design. If you haven’t already, your designer will likely tell you to look at your competitor’s and other industry websites. Take notes about what appeals to you. Also, look for web designers that have similar tastes to yours. You can normally view their portfolio to get an idea of their design tastes and style.
2. Collaborate: Don’t expect to call a designer, tell them you need a website, and have it done in a few weeks to your liking. You can expect to provide direction and ideas to a designer to give 
them a place to start. A good designer will ask you several detailed questions about your site, your site visitors, your needs, and your website goals. Be as specific and in-depth as possible so the web designer can offer input and different ideas and suggestions that you likely haven’t thought of. The more detail you provide a designer in the beginning and the more you collaborate with your designer, the better your web design will reflect what you want.
3. Be honest, but don’t quibble: Generally, designers give clients a mockup design or prototype of their site before making it into a working site. Often, this is where the rubber meets the road. If you’ve communicated well with your designer and the designer has listened to your needs and wants, this mockup should only need a few subtle changes, if any. But, if you don’t like it, be honest and tell your designer if you want to see a different design. A good designer wants your honesty, however, adding requests like moving an image to the left nine pixels or ‘adding these easy ten things’ can make your site look like it had a really bad haircut. Trust that your designer knows more about website design than you, because they do!
4. Don’t hold up your own project: Hiring a web designer does not resign you from participating in some elements of the project. If you chose to write the copy or content for your site, or hire a copywriter, make sure you do it and within the deadlines set. Otherwise, the lateness will most certainly holdup your website’s completion. Or if you want to provide your images, make sure you do so by the agreed upon deadline or sooner. Often, it is the client that holds up the website completion for failing to complete their portion or elements of the project.
5. Clearly communicate your business objectives: Like Steven Covey says, begin with the end in mind. Know what you want your website to accomplish and clearly communicate it with your web designer. What are your business objectives? How does a website help you meet them? Clearly communicating this with your designer will help both parties have a common perspective when planning and measuring against the design of the website.
6. Know your website target audience and user: How will your customers use your website and who are your customers? Knowing your audience and clearly communicating it with your web designer will make a night and day difference in the effectiveness of your site and the design itself. If your target audience is high school athletes, your web designer can customize the design and sites elements and functionality to that demographic.
Web designers can’t read your mind, so knowing what you want and clear communication is key to getting the website design that meets your business goals. Experienced designers know which questions to ask and will guide you through the process so that when you see your first design mockup, there are no surprises and the design and site elements are what you expected. DoubleDome has been designing websites for clients since 2000 – call us today to talk about your web design project 888-799-6067!
