If you or your business are currently (or are thinking of) building a new website, it is imperative that you inform your web designer (or prospective web design company), what it is you are looking to accomplish with your new website. It is essential for both yourself, and the web designer to understand where it is you are coming from, where you are wanting to go, and why. While impressive visual design is important, it is even more essential that the time and effort go into creating a useful website that will help prospective customers do what you ultimately want to do: buy your products or services.
We find that in order to have a successful web design project, it is important that you provide as much detail as possible to the web design team in order for them to make appropriate solutions and recommendations. To assist our clients, we have put together a collection of 20 questions (separated into 4 sections) that we find extremely useful when planning a new web design project for a client. While not all questions may be applicable to your website project, it is a great starting point to begin thinking about your website design goals.
Whether you choose to work with us or not, feel free to use this questionnaire as a starting point when beginning a discussion with your web designer. We’ve even created a Microsoft Word version of this website design questionnaire for you to download and edit if you so choose.
Target Market and Competition
- Describe in detail the products and/or services that you are trying to sell or market.
- What is the primary message that you want to communicate to your site visitors?
- In order of importance, list the demographics of the major types of visitors that you expect to visit your website. (include gender, age range, interests , and locality)
- Who are your main competitors? (include website links)
- What does your company do better than your competitors that distinguishes you from them?
Existing Website (if applicable)
- What are the major issues or limitations that exist with your current website?
- What do you like most about your current website?
- What areas of the current website do you believe that visitors most often look at?
- Are there any areas of the website that are not as visible, prominent, or accessible as they should be?
- Assuming you would like to keep the majority of the content from your current website, are there any sections that you do NOT wish to include on the new website?
New Website (Content & Functionality)
- What content pages would you would like to see on the new website?
- In terms of website functionality, please list all features that you wish to have accessible to visitors. Please rate each item with a priority number, with 10 being a required feature, and 1 being a “nice to have” feature. (example: photo gallery (8), chat forums (5), etc)
- Aside from static content pages, is there any data that needs to be displayed on the website that needs to be searched dynamically, or updated on a regular basis? (example: class schedules, customer reviews, product lists and pricing, etc)
- Are you looking to sell and accept payment for any products (or services) online? If so, please mention approximately how may products you plan to sell, what type of products you wish to sell, and what forms of payment you want to be able to accept.
- Do you require a content management system to allow you to update the website yourself, or is this a task that you wish to leave to the web developer?
- Do you require the website to be search engine optimized? If so, for what keywords (or phrases) would you like visitors to type into a search engine in order for them to find your website?
- Do you require that the website have visitor statistics saved for analysis?
New Website (Design)
- Do you have any colour preferences and or existing brand requirements that must be included in this website?
- Are there any colour schemes, layouts, or styling that you would not like to see in your new website design?
- Are there any websites that you have found online that are similar in style, quality, or layout that you can provide us? (list each link and a couple of notes about what it is you like about the website)
