Planning your project – Part 1
Here at Second Variety web development is our game and we know content management, e-commerce, software as a service (SaaS), cloud applications, SEO, advertising and a bunch of other jargon rich catch phrases and acronyms… unfortunately our clients on the whole don’t. We understand that our clients may know of one or two of these concepts and systems but, generally speaking, when a client comes to us with an idea they’re not interested the jargon. Some clients want to be hand held and others know how they want their site or application to work but are not always interested in how it gets done.
We are first and foremost web developers. Even though we use WordPress as a Content Management System on many of our projects, when it comes to finding out what our clients require we put all thought of the CMS out of our heads. We do this for two reasons:
- Clients don’t care about what CMS you use (mostly).
- If you think in terms of a CMS as developer it can be very limiting – you start to imagine the structure of the site based on what you know too well.
- Some applications just wouldn’t be possible if we used an off-the-shelf CMS so a custom coded solution is sometimes necessary.
The first meeting that occurs between a member of our team and a client is usually to determine what they want, what they can afford, their technical skill and who their intended users/customers or customers are. With that basic information we ask a series of questions about the client’s business and personal aims. Usually these questions are more about what their business means to them and what their ultimate aim is. Sometimes the non-technical questions are best in these situations because they can elicit some of the most important information about the project and its scope than any other questions we may at first think of.
Features and functionality are important but to really understand which features and what functionality is truly important to the client you need to know what their business and by extension the client herself is all about. Do they care about branding? If so do they have a designer or a perhaps an aesthetic look that inspires them? Do they want their business or brand to be everywhere at once? If so are they using tools for this already or do they want us to teach them how to use these tools in the first place? Perhaps they would like us to teach them to use their existing tools more effectively. The questions can go on and on until we are happy we can know everything we can there is to know about a client and their business.
A lot of the time clients are fearful not so much because of the technology but because of the potential for them to make a wrong choice. Half the time spent at an initial meeting can be about assuaging anxiety about technical jargon. The most important thing to keep in mind as a client at one of these meetings is the primary business aim. If your business is selling widgets xyz to customer abc then how does the proposed solution on the table help to maximise those sales and have you though about all the process you will be in charge of creating in order for that to work.
With that out of the way the real work gets done to determine all of the technical aspects of the site and the designs but I’ll leave that for the next post…
[...] development or project management but it should give people a rough idea of our working methods. In Part 1 we dealt with the way we approach our clients, during the planning phase, with questions. Those [...]