Have you just completed website designing courses and are looking forward to delivering professional websites to clients ? But don’t know where to start or what is the process of delivering such professional work ? Then this blog is just for you !
Hi, my name is Abhishek Singh and I have been a professional website designer for the past 3 years. The other day I was on a video call with my friend(Just completed website designing course from udemy) and he asked me that he had scored his big client but doesn’t know how to start working on the project. As the project brief was “A website for a dentist”.Along with that, the client has given him some basic photos of his clinic and some contact information.
The main issue I faced when I completed my course was that we only learn how to develop websites but they don’t teach us the proper cycle of taking the project and delivering it to the client.But i am going to share my 3 years experience of delivering more than 100+ professionally designed websites to the client.
PREREQUISITE
You should at least know about canva / photoshop / adobe xd / sketch / figma.
STEP 1
Whenever you discuss a project with the client, always ask for the below mentioned pointers.
- What is the purpose of this website (Informative, Promotional, Personal, Business, Lead Gen, E-Commerce, Directory, Classified Ads, SASS).
- What service/element should be highlighted.
- Will the website be dynamic/static.
- What will be the budget for this website.
- Discuss about the timeline of the project.
- Will the client be providing content for the website.
- Ask them to provide a logo, contact information and about for the website.
What is the purpose of this website ?
The purpose of a website could be defined as the true goal of a website. In other words what you want with the website i.e. If i am building a website for a English teacher its goal could be that visitors should be contacting the English teacher for some course. Just like an e-commerce website goal would be to get purchases from the visitors.
What service/element should be highlighted ?
This will be the CONVERSION page for your website like contact-us page, shop page, about page, service page etc. With this knowledge you will be able to highlight certain parts of your website in order to get them more exposure to your visitors.
Will the website be dynamic/ static ?
Simply said dynamic websites are those which allows the user(your client) to change some certain parts of the website. And static websites are those which require some knowledge of coding (html/php) to get changes on the website.
What will be the budget for the website ?
This will be a deciding factor for you to choose in which technology you will be developing the website. I follow a key rule never under quote in my freelancing days when I was new. I used to under quote my clients just to get some money rolling in but believe me it is a nightmare. Because you won’t be able to deliver the perfect website your client wants if you underquote.
For wordpress websites – $300-500 (Professional Grade Website)
For HTML & PHP – $1000-2000 (Professional Grade Website)
Discuss the timeline for the project ?
You should ask this question before you quote your price as i have encountered some of the clients who need websites in the shortest timeline possible so make sure to hike up the price according to that.
Will the client be providing content for the website ?
You should know if the client provides the content or not as you can give content writing to freelancers and then you can charge money accordingly.
Ask them to provide a logo, contact information and about for the website ?
These are the key pointers you should ask your clients as this is necessary for delivering a professional website. If the client doesn’t have a logo it’s fine but contact information and about is an absolute necessity.
STEP 2
Now as we have all the brief for the website and we have finally selected upon which technology we are developing the website.The first thing we do now is making some wireframes.
Build wireframes like these for all the pages.Then divide the pages into separate sections.
STEP 3
Get some feedback and finalize the design, colour scheme, placements, icons etc.Most importantly try to freeze this process within 3 iterations.
STEP 4
Now actually develop the website on whichever technology you choose. Now it would be easier for you too to develop the website as you have already known which colors to use, how much should the padding be on each element, which icons to use etc.
Get a first cut ready and show it to the client at this stage you won’t be accepting any changes in fonts, icons, placements of the elements, overall design elements. But you would be accepting changes of images, text and any other additional functionality(if budget allows like chatbot, popup forms etc).
STEP 5
Delivering the project. Once you are done with the website development and have incorporated every change of the client it’s time to deliver the website. Most of the agencies and the freelancer just deliver the website and don’t guide the clients with the admin panel and overall functionality. Make sure to guide your clients with each page of the website and the admin panel.
TIMELINE FOR WIREFRAMING – 7 Days tops
