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Questions to consider
These questions are worth considering when you're looking at commissioning a website. The answers are useful to us and will also help you to focus on your requirements and how exactly a website can help your business.
About your company/organisation
- What does your company/organisation do?
- Does your company/organisation use a tagline with its logo or have some form of mission statement?
- What is the main service/product your company/organisation offers?
- Are there any secondary services/products that your company promotes?
- How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?
Your website strategy
- Do you already have a website?
- If yes, what is the reason for re-designing the site?
- What function do you wish the website to perform? (You may wish it to offer information to your customers, use it as a tool to gather customer information, promote your brand or go as far as selling products from the site via an ecommerce solution)
- What concrete achievements do you hope to attain from the site? (You may wish to increase sales, capture customer information, increase customer service performance by offering information online etc and therefore reduce man hours)
- Is the site to be business to business or business to consumer?
- Who is the site to be aimed at?
- What is the visitor's ultimate goal? (Is it to order a product, retrieve information etc)
- Does your organisation have a corporate identity?
- Do you have printed literature that outlines your products/services?
- Are you aware of competitors' websites?
- Are there any sites you are familiar with that you feel work particularly well?
- Do you have a fixed budget?
- Could the development of the website be approached in phases?
- Is there a deadline for the launch of the site?
Your resources
- Do you have copy in electronic format/paper format that detail your products/services?
- Do you own any images that could be used on the website?
- Has the content for the website been considered in detail?
- Can you appoint a dedicated person to producing the copy?
- Are there any dates that may interrupt the flow of work - ie. holiday dates of key personnel, exhibition dates etc
Some technical questions
- Do you currently have website hosting organised?
- Which operating system is used throughout your company/organisation?
- Which web browser is used throughout your company/organisation?
- What would your content management requirements be? (Would the kind of website updates be infrequent, would you wish clear breeze | design to manage the content updates for you or would you look to amending the site yourself, either manually or via a tool?)
- Should the site interact with any existing system/website?