Last weekend I read an article from Smashing Magazine on “How To Communicate Design Decisions to Clients?“
In it, Brian Armstrong lists out five points a persons should consider when creating a web design template for a client. After reviewing the list, I thought that they are a few good points for clients to review when looking to redo or restructure their site. Below, are the five points that Brian lists:
1. Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend!
2. Every design should have a measurable goal
3. Your site should have one clear path
4. Remember the swiss army knife
5. Provide performance metrics
What you, as the client, needs to know:
1. From the clients perspective, think about this point. Ask yourself – “What static’s do we currently have on our site?” “What is our site demographic?” “How many of the people visiting our site are returning visitors or new visitors?”
If you’ve thought, “I don’t want to implement anything new on our website until the new design is ready”, you’ve thought the wrong thing. Start collecting stat’s on your site, today! Many don’t want to pay for stats, but how can you tell what your ROI (Return On Investment) is if you don’t have a way to track, analyize or measure the results of your “message”. There are many services out there that are cheap and will give you more infomation then you know what to do with.
If you still don’t want to pay for stats, you can check with your hosting company. Many times they’ll have some sort of free built in stats available. If they don’t, Google Analytic’s or FeedBurner (for blogs) provides free services to start recording these stats. Just sign up for their account, and they’ll walk you through what you need to do.
2. Measurable Goal – Ask yourself – “What do I want to accomplish with this site?” Unfortunately, the answer “Attract more people” is not a very good one. Stop. Think. What do you really hope to accomplish with this site? If your thinking about your church site, maybe the answer could be “I hope to use our site as a social networking tool, so that the people under 35 at our church can stay connected with each other, and meet new new people who will encourage them to live for Jesus”. Now that’s an answer & a measurable goal.
What a client then can do is go back to the statistics they have in place and analyze the results to see how close they are to this goal. From there, they can talk with the designer and communicate with them the results and any ideas they may have to reach this goal.
Stay tuned for Part 2…
Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap
