Aotearoa Web Design Ltd - WordPress Design, Development & Hosting

The initial meeting with any client is likely to be one of the most crucial moments in any web design project, outlined below are some basic questions to raise, to ensure there’s enough information to create a great website. There are many more, but with these basic questions addressed the chances of delivering a great product improve dramatically.

Your Business

With these questions you’re looking to get to the core of how you do business, how any orders are processed, and where you rank with your competition.

• How does your business make money?
• Describe a typical enquiry or the order process for your company
• Are there any challenges your business is currently struggling to address?
• Is your business leading-the-way, keeping pace, or playing catch–up in your marketplace?

Your Audience

This set of questions will get you thinking about your target audience and what it is that they need from your website.

• What does your target audience care about?
• Where/how do people learn about your company/product/service?
• Why does your target audience need this website?

Your Website

Here we get to some specifics needs that your client wants to realise via your website. The first question might seem a little obvious, but you may be surprised what kind of answers you get and what kind of discussion it stimulates. It’s a great one to lead with.

• Why do you need this website?
• How does this website fit into your business model?
• Should this website influence your company’s current enquiry to sale process?
• Are there any business challenges you want to address with this website?
• How does the website affect your profit model? For example, if the website fails to be effective, how specifically does it affect your profitability?

Being painfully aware that my own presence on the web has been a little like the proverbial ‘mechanics car’ – I have finally settled on a base theme on which to build.
And yes – WordPress is my platform of choice. The reason for this is two-fold (at least). I am now the proud owner of one of those iPhone’s and I can post updates via it (how cool is that?).
The platform is open source, and I can see a lot of my clients being very happy with a system like this, so it’s high time I jumped in and got my feet dirty.
To be perfectly honest it just seems as though a lot of technologies are finally coming of age, it’s easier to publish via different methods and the control is now shifting back to the client (rather than the designer/developer).
That has to be a good thing.
I’m not at all worried about the future of webdesign – in fact I’m looking forward to it…