How to make profitable design development sites (part 1)

Let's first decide for whom this article (hereinafter the performer), and what problems you face every day.

• freelance designer;
• designer working in a web-studio / web-agency;
• web-studio / web-agency;
• mediator between the above and the client.

A meeting

All presented types of performers are faced with the same questions. I propose in this series of articles to sort these questions together. Of course, everyone has a different beginning of communication. Some go to the client, waiting for the appointed time, when they will be ready to accept. Further, they personally discuss with the owner or group of subordinates the design of the future offspring. The latter receive tasks from their management or lazily receive a client in their office and listen to how to draw the “seven red lines” ( video ). Still others, the lucky ones, sit at home or in a separate office and receive all the tasks in correspondence or calling up a customer - for example, via Skype.


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Formulation of the problem

Then everyone has one and the same problem: how to remember everything the client said, and after the first layouts to remind (or rather even convince) that this is exactly what the client asked. After that, you need to go back to the beginning and redo - sometimes all completely.

Prototypes

Then you need to find what your customer needs. On the one hand, you understand how it should be. You, as a designer, know what he needs. And here you have something born and you think: “yes, this is what he needs ... he will like that”. Sit down and make several pages in a row. Consider the most common situation: the designer gives mockups to the project manager, and he presents the mockup to the client (using one of the methods described above), returns and says: “we make 100,500 edits in this mockup, and the client wants to see 2-3 more options to choose from.” At the meeting, of course, the client was shown your previous work, considered competitors. Of course, your favorite sites and a couple of sites of top resources were opened to the client - they say, “look, nobody does this ...”.

First layout

But the result is one: redo again. “He didn’t like my variant ... it’s unclear what he wants ... and 2-3 more variants” - the designer thinks angryly. Then begins to revise a ton of examples shown to the client.

Filling

Go ahead: you have already chosen one layout with the client, the one that will not change until the end of the project (you think). Then the question arises: how to fill the 32 pages of the site? Well, for the main one you have a brilliant idea. There are 5-7 more pages, let's call them standard: contact information, brief news, detailed news, reviews, documents ... Your list ends here. The client in his head represents something in between the site of GAZPROM, where there is a lot of text, photos and illustrations, and the site apple.com (well, or its analogue, colorful, with curls). Or maybe he was engaged in cutting wood at school and imagines a website in curls and text in the form of chips. Well, you caught the gist.

The question is what to fill. Yes, part of the pages can be hammered with “fish”, you can take beautiful “foreign people” with a crossed out pad. But what will happen next ... what will it look like with real content? There are “pages in development”, pages with two sentences or pages with photos that are embarrassing to show. And this is your client, your face, your portfolio. Yes, you can give him a text editor in the admin panel of the site - say, "fill as you see fit." And then in the portfolio to show what the client has placed there, using the copy / paste method from his doc file with large red letters on a blue background ...

Development and control

Here you start messing up with the transfer of layouts to the client -> demonstration -> discussion -> edits -> and in a circle. What problems arise? Lots of! It is at this stage that the main work begins. It was here that the client recalls that he wanted something else in this project. And, perhaps, he imagined many things differently than you (the lead project) or your designer. The client is on the spot, then he has a business trip and he is only with a phone in his hand. Often the client is simply busy with work and forgets that you showed him last week which models have already been approved and which ones have not yet. Maybe just on Friday evening, when he came home, he wanted to look at the design that had been done this week. Here you can list for a long time.

Closing work

It all depends, of course, on the initial agreements (50/50, payment after the fact, payment in stages, hourly, etc.). But the result remains the same: until the client sees everything he wants, he will not pay. Not just pay, and pay everything on time. And then you will receive another order from his partners or friends.

The result of the first part

In this article, I outlined the main problems encountered in the design of sites. In the next part, I will show you how to deal with them in order to save time and maximize your profits. Keep for updates.

All parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 .

ps This article is my first (if something is wrong - sorry), do not judge strictly. This article describes the generalized and averaged problems that I have personally experienced when working on the IT market since 2005. She does not answer the questions “How?”, “What?” And “Why?”, You need to “draw”, her task is to reveal organizational problems. I want to share my experience on how to properly organize the approach to work as a whole (the designer and the designer) and the client. In the following parts I will try to reveal each of the problems described above. Again, I will write in general, so that most readers can apply this knowledge. I do not want to consider 5% of narrow and rare clients. I want to show 95% of customers, just “plankton” in the IT world and how to work with them. At the same time, these customers may be successful businessmen, private entrepreneurs and specialists in their field, but they will not understand anything in your work (designer or web development).