Your website is your digital salesman; it acts as your identity in the digital world. Therefore, it becomes crucial for you to invest in an impressive site that keeps the audience engaged and, at the same time, drive sales.
When you choose a web development agency, you need to make sure they understand your business and are on the same wavelength right from the initial discussions. Also, it would be optimal if you kept an eye on their zeal and excitement about working with you and especially the questionnaire they ask before starting the project.
In this blog, we have listed and discussed a few critical web development questionnaire that you should expect from the website development agency. A questionnaire that helps them develop an engaging and results-driven website.
Q.1 What is your Business About?
It is of paramount importance that the agency knows everything about your business before they start with the project. Sometimes, your business might look very obvious at prima facie, and they might decide to skip the question altogether. However, it is recommended never to put anything on assumptions, especially when working on your website.
The website gives an essence of what you do, so it has to be quite impressive at first glance. When the visitor lands on the site, it should compel them to explore most of the website. The website should speak about your values, mission, and motto. It should also lay out your vision for the future and talk about your experience in the industry and successful projects.
Q.2 Do you have any Current Website or had One Before?
Let them know if you have a current website or had one before; it helps them to decide the scope of the work. If the website is being built from scratch, the current website becomes a mine of data, which can be modified and used. It becomes easier to put forward your likes and dislikes and help them avoid the earlier mistakes from being repeated with the new website.
Having an already built website structure speeds up the timeline of the project. The task becomes more relaxed as the designer only has to modify the structure based on your requirements.
Q.3 What do you want to Achieve with the Website?
When your website development agency asks you, what are your goals and expectations behind building a new website?
It is at this point; you should be well prepared to answer questions such as –
- Do you want more visitors to the site?
- Generate leads and sales?
- Gain more engagement through blogs and social media links?
- Create more brand awareness or make them sign up for newsletters or news alerts?
Establishing a goal and conveying it to the website developers makes it easier for them to create a goal-oriented website.
Q.4 Who is Your Target Audience?
Target audience plays a vital role in every marketing campaign, and website design is no different. When designing and developing a website, one should always remember that it is not just being developed for the company but the target audience.
They are the ones who are going to consume the site the most. If the site doesn’t strongly resonate with the demands of the audience, they might hop the tab. Thus, the right web developer will always ask you about your target audience and build a site that clicks with your audience.
“The website should act as a bridge between the client and their target audience and become a catalyst for increased revenue.”
Q.5 Tell us Something About your Competitors
The digital world is extremely competitive; businesses need to be different and unique from each other all the time to stay ahead of the race. You can efficiently use the website to highlight your Unique Selling Point (USP) and in a completely different way than your competitors. As mentioned earlier, having some information about your competitors will always be on the checklist of web developers.
The competitor’s website can act as a reference (not the benchmark) to study, analyze, and understand what’s working for them and what’s not. How do they impress their audience? It can be as simple as a free first consultation, free delivery, and any such stand-out service. You can also bring to the table what you like and dislike about your competitor’s website and help the developers create a unique website.
Q.6 Would you like any Additional Features?
It may be at the last point, but it’s also the most important one – Always inform the developers about any additional features that need to be incorporated into your new website. If not established upfront, it may lead to late additions, unnecessary tensions, and the scope of the project goes for a toss. It can be as simple as having a particular banner or image resizing, the inclusion of a chatbot, or video integration.
It is highly recommended to check whether all requirements have been incorporated before making the website live. This prevents regular changes to the website, once it is entirely up and running. However, you can make the website dynamic by adding new blogs or by updating the news and events section regularly. This is also the right opportunity to let the developers know about the style guides that need to be followed and incorporated into the new website.
Q.7 Will you require a CMS?
The web development agency must inform you whether you will require a CMS or not based on your requirements. For those who are not familiar with the term, CMS is the abbreviation for ‘Content Management System’. It is one of the essential tools that is designed to help you organize, curate, and publish your content online.
Just for your information, if you opt for CMS software (most of which are free of cost), you won’t require any coding skills to make any changes to the website. You can add new content or tweak the existing one many times and any time without having any coding skills. With multiple access accounts, it gives you complete control over who can change the content on the website, protecting it from errors and attacks.
However, the other alternative to CMS is the static HTML. With this option, the process is straightforward; the website developer writes the code (sometimes including the content). Then, once on to the server and being live, the website continues to remain there in finished form without any background processing.
Some Additional Pointers that you Need to Consider
The below questionnaire are a few additional things you need to discuss with your web development agency before they begin their work.
SEO Compatible Content
The web development agency has to make sure that the website is well-structured and easy to crawl for search engines. It also has to have unique content and not duplicated from anywhere else on the web.
Speed Optimization
Page load time is a crucial website performance metric that affects conversion rates, website visibility, and customer loyalty. The agency has to ensure that the website loads faster, offers an excellent user experience, and reduces the bounce rate.
Responsive Design
The developers need to ensure that the website is dynamically changing its appearance depending upon the screen size and orientation of the device on which it is being viewed upon. In short, it needs to look good on any device, be it a desktop or mobile.
On-Page SEO
Make sure that the agency has optimized every individual web page of the website. On-Page optimizing these factors leads to increased ranking and traffic to the website. The critical elements of the website that you can optimize include URL, content, keywords, images, speed, etc.
Annual Maintenance
A website maintenance contract is crucial for the safety and security of the website. Having the website checked regularly for internal and external links, new content optimization, and security are a part of the annual maintenance contract.
Start Building a Great Website Today
When a web design & development company tries to understand your business, audience, competitors, and requirements, they can create a website that works wonders for your business. What if you have hired a website developer, who has already begun working on the project without procuring the above web design questionnaire? In such a case, the chances are high that your website is not turning out to be as efficient as you thought it would be.
If you are on the look-out for the best in the market website developers, then Impulse Digital is where your search ends. A website developed by us will undoubtedly boost your sales and help grow your business at a faster rate. Contact us at the link.
