6 Things to GetClear On Before You Hire a Web Designer
In my experience, ‘get a website up and running’ is something almost everyone knows they need to do for their business, project, NGO, or event.
Before you put your CV out there looking for a new job, you know you ought to have an online portfolio ready for prospective employers to look at
Before you publish your first book, a website detailing who you are and what you’ve published will help market your work more effectively
As you get more serious about marketing yourself as a photographer, your best work needs to be visible for new clients to get a sense of who you are and book you
Before you advertise an upcoming retreat, event, or festival, you need an online home ready for the attendees
A website has become the baseline for doing any kind of business in our current very ‘online’ world, and there is a lot that goes into getting ready for your website build beyond finding someone you trust and whose design you connect with, to build the site for you.
In this post I’ll take you through six areas you can work on now before you even start looking for a web designer.
Purpose
Thinking through what the purpose of your website will be, is gold. Your website, once up and running, works for you 24/7 and never sleeps, so start to think about how you want your website to work for you.
Answer the question: what do I want my website to do?
Do you want to display a portfolio of your best work?
Do you want to develop authority as an expert in your field?
Do you want to generate enquiries?
Do you want to book discovery calls with prospective clients?
Do you want to sell products, courses, or memberships?
Do you want to market your services?
A website can have multiple purposes, of course, but without something to do the site becomes decorative, a kind of online brochure with no job. Most people ask the question: “How should my website look?” but don’t go further to ask “What job is my website responsible for in my business?”
Audience
It is helpful to think through who your website is for. What kind of person are they? What do they care about most? What stage in their journey are they?
Does your audience need to find information fast and make decisions quickly? (this translates into minimal, clean design that does not confuse)
Would they long to be inspired by your gorgeous photography? (visuals need to be crisp, and the main feature)
Do they need to feel a sense of trust in your expertise and authority? (credentials, associations, testimonials and reviews need to be clearly visible)
Too much information can overwhelm, not enough can be frustrating. Give thought to who is using your website, how they arrive at your site, and what would be most helpful for them at the stage they find themselves in. Your website belongs to you, but it is there to serve your audience.
Offer/Service Clarity
Service clarity is more than listing what you do. It’s defining the shape, scope, and boundaries of your work so people immediately understand how they can engage you, and whether they should.
What exactly are you offering?
Clear services with defined outcomes?
Custom work?
Packages with a set scope?
Ongoing retainers or once-off projects?
Do you offer coaching, digital products, memberships?
What is included — and just as importantly, what isn’t?
When your services are loosely defined, your website becomes vague. Visitors have to work too hard to figure out how to hire you. And when people have to work too hard, they leave.
Clear offers create confident decisions. When you can articulate what you do in simple, jargon-free language, people can quickly recognise themselves in your work, or realise they’re not the right fit. Both outcomes are helpful.
Clarity reduces friction. And friction is what quietly stops people from taking the next step.
Content Readiness
“Content” refers to all the information on your site, both visual and written. Content can include:
Brand design: logo files, secondary logos, brand guidelines. These are visual files usually saved as .png files (logo) and .pdf files (brand guides)
Written content for your website pages including Home, About, Service/s, Contact, and other pages like Blogs, Portfolios, Testimonials, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy and so on. These are usually written files saved as .doc or .docx files.
Lead generators/downloads: If you plan to offer a freebie download in exchange for people’s email address for your newsletter sign up, you will need these files ready ideally as designed .pdf files.
Images: brand photos, stock photos (free or paid), affiliate logos, partner logos. These are usually .jpg or .jpeg files (stock images) and .png files (logo/partner logo files).
Inventory: if you plan to host an online shop or ecommerce with multiple products, you may have your inventory names, descriptions, product codes, variants, categories and pricing ready in a .csv or .xls file
Courses: if you plan to host a membership based website, your written courses should be ready in .docx or .doc files, or you may want to share video in which case you’ll need your video ready in .mp4 file format.
Newsletters: if you plan on sending regular newsletters, or running nurture or drip campaigns for prospective clients, you will want to consider developing this set of emails saved as .doc or .docx files.
Even imperfect files, documents and notes are helpful. A designer’s role is to shape and refine, but they can’t invent the content that is your role to provide. The process moves much faster when there’s something to work with.
Brand Direction
You don’t need to arrive at the start of your web design process with a full brand identity system - I work with people who on the one extreme have no branding (logo or brand guidelines) as well as those on the other extreme who have gone through a thorough branding process with a professional graphic designer to develop a logo, submark and other visual assets that define their business and brand online. You don’t need to have all of this in place but it does help to have a sense of tone and feeling both in the visual aspects of images, colours, contrast and spacing and written language in tone, sense and expression. Is your business:
Minimal and calm?
Bold and expressive?
Structured, formal and authoritative?
Fun and irreverant?
Friendly, casual and welcoming?
Visual direction affects every design decision.
Capacity & Commitment
It is so important to realistically assess whether you have the time and space to commit to a website build when you are considering how to prepare for the process. A website build requires a lot from you including: thinking work, content development, writing, decision-making, budget considerations, scope decisions.
If you don’t have the time and capacity to work these processes into your schedule, the website build will come to a grinding halt!
A quiet truth
Hiring a website designer is entering into a partnership. The more clarity you bring to the process, the more elevated the result. When you bring a sense of clarity, purpose, direction, however imperfect you won’t just get a “prettier” website, you’ll get a website that works. Your designer can spend less time extracting information and more time refining it. Decisions happen faster. Your website launches with less hesitation and greater confidence.
Do the thinking now.
Consider who it’s for.
Get clear on the job your website needs to do.
Gather what you have.
Define what you offer.
Assess your capacity.
When you’re ready to begin, you won’t just be hiring someone to build pages, you’ll be stepping into the process prepared to build something that lasts.
When you bring clarity into a website build, the process becomes faster, smoother, and far more strategic. If you’d like expert guidance shaping these answers into a website that works, get in touch.
