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Without further ado, these are the ’11 Questions To Ask A Client Before Starting A Web Design Project.’ 🤘
1.) What Does Your Business do?
Before jumping right into the design process, you need to understand your client’s business.
We can not stress the importance of this enough.
Exceptional web designers/developers understand their client’s business very well. Understanding your client’s niche allows you to design the site’s architecture (pages, keywords, etc.) around the products/services they’re offering.
Furthermore, doing the proper research will enhance your copyrighting skills & enable you to charge higher rates for your web design services.
In our web design agency, we almost always provide the copyrighting for our client’s because we take the time to investigate their business.
This is a win-win situation because we’re paid more for being the experts, & the client can rest easy knowing that everything’s being taken care of on the digital end.
Having a deep understanding of your client’s business will enhance the following:
- Overall Web Design
- Google Page Rank (Discoverability)
- Copyrighting (Topical Relevance Of The Text)
- Site Structure (Headings, URL’s, Title’s, Meta Descriptions, etc.)
- Value Of Your Services
- Conversion Rates
2.) Do you currently have a website? (Are We Designing Or Redesigning)
The approach is totally different when redesigning a website vs. designing a website from scratch.
See; Web Design Services For Small Business
Before redesigning a website you need to answer the following questions:
- What’s the main reason why you want to redesign your website?
- Is the website outdated?
- Is the site non-responsive (Doesn’t responsively adapt to different screen sizes & devices)
Or maybe the website is sleek & modern but it’s not converting potential clients.
Whatever the reason may be, it’s your job to identify the main reason your client needs to redesign their website.
♦ An important thing to note here is that a client generally will have no idea why they need to redesign their website, all that they will have is a biased opinion ♦
Therefore, it’s your job to position yourself as a consultant so that you can identify the problem areas your client’s facing & provide creative solutions.
99% of the time businesses are completely unaware of the fact that they’re getting virtually no web traffic because of their site’s architecture.
This is the dilemma that’s often faced when websites are created by designers & developers with zero SEO expertise.
We do not advise hiring amateur designers/developers (If you are an amateur designer/developer do yourself a favor & learn SEO, it will make your skillset exponentially more valuable).
Need help redesigning or designing a site?
Book a complimentary consultation with one of our Expert SEO Consultants.
3.) What's The Main Message You Want To Get Across To Your Audience?
There has to be a reason your prospect wants to design a website, it’s your job to find out what it is!
What message are we attempting to convey to people when they visit our site?
Are we trying to persuade them to buy our products/services?
Maybe the site is purely educational & filled with information to answer specific questions that people have.
Whatever the case may be, know your client, & know your market.
Marketing strategies differ between businesses & where they’re positioned within their respective industries.
Understanding your client’s brand position will save you countless revisions & allow you to effectively incorporate images/texts in alignment with your client’s brand strategy.
4.) What Are Your Long-Term Business Goals & Objectives?
We want our web designs to have longevity & increase the value of our client’s digital real estate.
A well-rounded understanding of your client’s goals/objectives will enable you to know which keywords to place the most emphasis upon.
In other words, you should create individual pages for your main keywords.
♦ For example: ♦
Let’s say you’re going to be designing a website for a personal injury lawyer.
In your consultation session you need to identify & evaluate exactly what service the personal injury lawyer offers, & if they offer multiple services you need to find out which is the most lucrative among them.
♦ Why? ♦
Because we’re going to place more emphasis on these key terms which will get our client more qualified leads, higher targeted web traffic, & hopefully increase their revenue.
Additionally, it’s important to know the long-term goals of your prospective client so that you can custom-tailor your design process & set yourself up for success.
Identifying our client’s long-term goals & objectives allows us to know which keywords we should be focusing on ranking for long-term.
5.) How Much Is A Sale Worth To You?
This is a key point which should be articulated for the purpose of closing the deal.
During your consultation process you need to help your prospect see the value of your services.
We need to shift the perspective of web design being an “expense” to being an investment.
One way to shift the mindset of your prospective client is to help them understand that investing in a well designed website is actually going to be an asset.
That is to say, it’s going to generate more revenue for your business.
However, there are some key variables that need to be taken into consideration so that this “blanket statement” is not debunked as completely untrue.
- Your website must be maintained & stay up to date
- You must invest in SEO & it must be done properly by experts
- Backlinks do matter & hold a lot of weight in Google’s ranking algorithm
- Competition varies drastically from industry to industry
6.) How Are You Currently Marketing Yourself & Your Business?
The reason we ask our prospective client’s this is to determine where they’re at in the marketing process, how comfortable they’re investing in marketing (We’ll leverage this later), & to gain a better overall understanding of how they market their products and/or services.
This question is astonishingly powerful because your prospect may say, “Gosh, well, I guess I’m not really doing too much marketing I thought people would just kind of find me.”
Yeah, so did we 🥲. (Jk we’re professionals)
On a more serious note, we always strive to ADD VALUE to businesses that we partner with. For us, this is the most useful consultation strategy, & it allows us to foster some incredible relationships.
Furthermore, this question opens the door to sell other services (assuming you offer more than one).
During this part of the consultation we try to find out if the prospect can benefit from; Social Media Management, Brand Strategy, or SEO, because we’re highly proficient in those areas & we know that we can grow businesses rapidly by managing their entire digital presence.
In conclusion, you’ll be much more effective in the web design consultation process if you take a genuine interest in the success of your client.
7.) Who's Your Target Market?
Finding out your client’s target market is crucial because it allows you to cater your web design directly to them.
You need to speak to the customer & they need to relate to you.
This is why good design is a sophisticated art form, because it’s difficult to do, & only a few can do it well.
Every decision you make throughout the designing process should have the consumer in mind, because that’s ultimately who we’re selling to.
You may be creating the website for the business owner, but it should be designed for the potential buyer.
At Lords Only, we allocate a good deal of time to understanding target markets so that we can successfully employ our designs.
This ensures our web designs have longevity, since we’ve taken the time to understand our markets search behavior.
Once you understand search intent you can determine what search terms you should be ranking for.
This will give you quite the competitive edge, since a lot of websites are only ranking for certain keywords by happenstance.
8.) Can You Provide Some Examples Of Websites You Like?
This is for contextual purposes only.
Gathering an idea of the client’s taste for design will help you better understand how you should design the look & feel of their website.
Since design is such a subjective matter, this question can save you countless revisions & enhance the probability of customer satisfaction.
While you should not aim to copy another site exactly, you can use it as a loose reference while designing.
9.) Do you have pictures?
If the client has pictures, great.
However, most of the time this is not the case & you need to be prepared to present creative solutions.
High-quality images can be found on Unsplash or Shutterstock.
Although, be wary of the file size & dimensions of images you’re downloading photos from third-party sites, as non-optimized photos may slow down your site significantly.
Always aim to use a lazy load plug-in to keep your site speed fast.
A good lazy load plug-in by WP Rocket can be found here.
10.) What's Your Budget?
A lot of consultants do everything right, but leave out the most important question!
“What’s your budget?”
You need to become skilled at asking this question in a savvy manner.
Additionally, the client’s design requirements must be in alignment with their allocated budget or there will be an imbalance.
No, we’re not designing a 25-page website about Astrophysicists for $1,500.
Good luck though!
Remember, it’s your job as a web design consultant to showcase the value of your services & deliver the results.
If you can do those two things consistently & effectively, then you will succeed.
11.) Will You Be Needing Any Graphic Design Services?
This is your chance to upsell!
If you have an agency with Graphic Designers on hand, then this is the perfect time to secure more business.
We’ve landed Web Design projects & tacked on additional sales by offering our logo design services.
Again, this is a win-win situation where the client gets an exceptional logo & a fantastic website.
Our ability to position ourselves as branding experts has enabled us to do some pretty cool things, & we’re only getting started.
Thanks for taking the time to read our article, & if you’re thinking of launching a project go ahead & fill out the form below!