If you’re looking to have someone make a website for your company, it can be hard to know where to start. Even if you have a good understanding of websites in general, things can get confusing quickly, and you may not know exactly what questions to ask or what skills the developer you’re working with should have in order to create the website you need.
To help clear up the confusion, I sat down with my fellow web developers at Insight Creative, Zane Statz and Bart Raboin, to talk about a few things that we think are important to look for when you’re collaborating with a web designer/developer. You can listen to the recording of our conversation here, or read the highlights below.
Kevin on the importance of making sure the communication between client and developer is collaborative, flexible and fun:
“When you’re designing something, it’s easy to fall into the trap of presenting… it becomes this big presentation of something that you’ve done rather than a conversation. It becomes a very one-sided thing. You present something one way, and maybe there’s a little bit of feedback the other way, but it doesn’t feel really two-sided and it feels really formal. So what we try to do is make it very conversational and very collaborative. And that comes from frequent discussion and feedback. We love getting feedback in the middle of the process because we want to be really flexible and if something’s not working we can just talk about it and have a discussion about it.”
Bart on keeping a website flexible so that it can adjust to meet new needs as things change:
“A lot of clients will look at a website as a set it and forget it product, and we help them understand that it’s a living thing just like their business and it can grow with them, and we help walk them through that.”
Zane and Kevin on making sure the basics are covered, which is harder than it sounds:
Zane: “Responsive design is key now… making a website that looks and feels and works on all platforms and doesn’t only work on a few platforms.”
Kevin: “Yeah this is kind of a basic thing about web design now, but you can find web developers that don’t do it, and that’s making sure that a website works on every platform… That’s a basic thing now, but if you don’t know to look for it, it can get forgotten.”
For a more detailed look at responsive design, read my earlier post, Insight into Mobile Friendly Websites.
© Insight Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.
