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What Do You Pay Your Website Designer To Do?
Neil McNulty
19th Feb, 2014 -
When it comes to building a new website people tend to believe that by simply engaging the services of a website designer their new website will become a great success and will not require any more involvement from them going forward.
Well this is not the case contrary to what you may be lead to believe. We have compiled a scenario of what we mean below. Keep in mind some of the actual details have been changed.
Almost a year ago we had a meeting with a would be client who was starting up a new business in the fashion industry. The client was from the United Kingdom and was really keen on being able to provide access of exclusive products from around the world to the Australian marketplace. We had a reasonably lengthy meeting and everything was going well.
At this meeting we asked them for a few basic things like logos, a few colour preferences and other design related items. All of which is a standard process that we have done for years now. We advised the client we would need to get product descriptions, images, pricing etc and finally we would need them to supply the content / text they wanted to have appear on the website.
This is where things started to go wrong. The client said “Well you are the website designer you are meant to do all of this for me. It is your job!”
We then asked the client as to why they thought this is the case. They replied “When we engage a website designer they do everything relating to it. They build the site, write the content and get it ranking on the top of google. It is all included in the price.”
When we advised them that it is not the case as per the quote they had initially signed and agreed to. While we had clearly stated in the quote what they were getting and what was expected of them it seemed as though it was all too hard.
We then asked them in for another meeting just to go over the details so that everyone was clear. This helped clear a lot of misconceptions up like who supplied the content and other information etc. It did smooth everything over and the client was happy to continue. It did show a good point which was “What is it that you pay your website designer to do if they are meant to build the website for you?”
To keep it really simple website designers are there to perform a few basic tasks. While a lot of people may believe it is different to what you are about to read it is the only solution we have seen that will work in 99% of the cases. So that you do not find yourself in a similar situation with any designer we have compiled below a list of tasks and who does which one and why.
Collecting and compiling information / content for the website – This is the CUSTOMERS job unless of course you are paying for a copywritter or marketing agency to compile it for you. Typically though you would be writing and supplying the content for your website as it is about your business and what your business offers. Think of this as your education process to your first sales person / website designer. Unless they know about your business and you can give them the information they need to sell your products/services then they cannot sell anything.
Designing and Building the website – You are paying a “WEBSITE DESIGNER”, whether it be a website designer on the sunshine coast or anywhere else in the world it is exactly the same. They are paid to purely DESIGN and BUILD the website.
Reviewing / Testing the website – This one is a 50/50 Designer/Customer job as the customer needs to make sure it contains the information they have supplied and got everything in it they asked for. The web designers job is to make sure it is working and has in it what the customer is paying for.
Launching the website – This is the WEBSITE DESIGNERS job as they need to move it to a server and make sure it loads when people type in your website address.
Ongoing Online Marketing – A SEO / Paid Search Professional / Internet Marketer. You are wanting it to rank of the top of the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc then you need to engage the services of a Internet Marketer / SEO Professional / Paid Search Professional. The reason for this is because this is a specialist skillset that not many designers have. The good ones have been working in the marketing side of the industry for 5 years or more. They will charge and it may not be cheap for the good ones.
Hopefully this has been a helpful article which will help you through the process of building your next website.
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