A great website project is a collaboration between a business and a designer. This “Starter Kit” article is geared towards sole proprietors, small business owners, artists, writers, etc, and you want to be sure to read from top to bottom – don’t skip anything.

These “3 Things” are crucial, remarkably simple, and just plain smart. By following them you’ll enable your designer with your expert knowledge so that he or she can can build you a site that provides your successful switch from offline to online marketing and business.

So, here you go. The Top 3 Things you need to do right now for your web design project.

1. Have your site content ready.

• If this is your first site, you have to put on some new thinking. You might not have full documents that would provide good content for your website because most brick and mortar businesses don’t require it. If you publish a newsletter, those are great content for the web. Put them all in one folder if they aren’t already. Put sales letter in the folder and anything else that’s been written by you to sell or advertise you and your products or services. Essentially, round-up all marketing material you’ve produced for your business and get it all together.
• One of the major tools/techniques that designers use to get your website seen is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Along with gathering your documents into one place, also start thinking about how customers think about what you do. Part of the art and science of SEO is to build keyword lists, titles, and descriptions that accurately reflect how people might search for you online. If you’re a shoe retailer, for instance, some keywords might be: shoes, boots, footwear, etc. I think this gives you an idea. This is something your designer will work on with you and he or she will do research on your behalf, but the first bit of information really needs to come from you.
• If you don’t have testimonials from customers or clients, start working on this now. If you’ve just struck out on your own after spending time working for others, you may be able to get in touch with clients who you had good relationships with. Ask them to write something up for you. If you left on good terms, ask your former supervisors or even co-workers if they’d be willing to write something for you. You’ll find that most people will be flattered to be asked and will gladly write something for you. If you’re on LinkedIn, grab whatever was written for you there.
• Studies are conclusively proving that in today’s world, a vast majority of people listen to what peers say about their colleagues and value the opinion of clients over anything you say yourself. This is where you start to tie into the power of community and social media. This is also the reason why ad dollars are plummeting – no one wants to be sold to. They want to discover for themselves, through social networks, who is good to do business with and who isn’t. Leverage this to give yourself an advantage and create buzz for your products or service.

2. Be prepared to give input when asked.

• Creating a website and presence for you is a team effort. Of course, the size of your business and the budget of your project come into play here, but if you’re a small business or entrepreneur, you’ll probably be hiring and working with the designer yourself. When an email or phone call come in from your designer for clarification on a point, or to have you look at work in progress, respond to that as quickly as possible. That keeps the project moving forward and allows you both to be productive.

3. Look at a lot of sites in your business niche.

• I can’t stress this one enough. Start getting an idea of what others in your field are doing on the web. A good way to get this rolling is to open up your favorite search engine and start looking up those keywords you created earlier. Make note of sites you like and be prepared to say why when asked. But don’t just look at the home page, navigate your way around the site and pay particular attention to what kind of effort it takes to do that. Is the site intuitive, or is it hard to find what you’re looking for? If you’re looking at products similar to yours, are the descriptions clear and concise, or are you left wondering just what their selling proposition is?
• Here’s a quick quiz. Where were the links you clicked on? If you’re like 90% of the online population, they were the top two or three in the link list. Very, very few people scroll down to see what’s at the bottom and even fewer go to the next page of links. You however, as part of your research to enable the team of you and your designer to create a great website, are going to scroll down and hit a few towards the bottom of that first page. And you want to do that for comparison. You want to see the difference between a site well prepared to attract attention and one that for whatever reason isn’t quite there yet.
• Make a list of those URLs and give it to your web designer so that he or she can get an idea of the types of design you may be looking to emulate. Discuss these and listen to the input given to you. You may be told that one won’t work very well because of the navigation scheme, or that another will be way beyond your budget because of costly functionality. Don’t fall in love with anything – just like you’re told when buying a house – and reassess based on feedback from your designer.

And there you have it – short and sweet, but loaded with productive strategies. If you take the time to do this, you will distinguish yourself as an aware business person who values what a professional web designer can do for you. By providing your designer with this information you allow them to do what they do best, so that you can do what you do best.

To your continued success,

Jeff