How to ensure the best starting point for the design of your new website

When it comes to investing in a new website, we often see many go straight to the surface of things: choosing colors, fonts, artwork and layout in general. But therein lies the danger of overlooking the real challenges that a designer can be the key to solving. It is not enough to ask for a “nice” web design and expect it to automatically solve all the underlying problems.

One of the biggest mistakes is to limit yourself to superficial demands and wishes. A typical request might read: “We need a website for our health clinic.” But this is only the beginning. Understanding the deeper layers and the current challenges is essential to achieve a web design that is not only attractive but also effective.

When ordering a new website, it is essential to delve deeper into what you really need:

Define the purpose clearly: What do you want to achieve with your website? Is it to attract more customers, inform the local community or something else entirely?
Understand your target audience: Who are your primary visitors? What are their needs, wants and tastes? Understanding the behavior of your potential customers can be crucial to designing a website that appeals to them.
Specific requirements and points of differentiation: How does your company differ from the competition? What unique services or benefits do you offer? Communicating these on your website is important.
Define success: How do you measure success for your website? Is it more visitors, more bookings or something else? Having clear success goals is critical to evaluating the effectiveness of the new design.

Working closely with your designer is also essential. Don’t hold back on providing as much information as possible about your company, your customers and the challenges you face. The more insight the designer gets, the better they can tailor the solution to your needs.

That is why we always hold personal start-up meetings with our customers before we start the design process of a new website. Here it is important for us to learn more about the customer as a company/person, but also about their customers and their customer journey, so that together we can identify any problems and where optimization can be done. In the above example, where the customer requests a website for their health clinic and perhaps elaborates with: “We would like a design that better informs our local neighborhood about the services we offer in our health clinic”. Will our designers be able to follow up with deeper questions such as:

What neighborhood is it?
What unique services do you offer?
How is it different from the other clinics in the neighborhood?
What will success look like for the company and the residents of the neighborhood?
Should the website be easy for the customer to maintain or should there be open options that could possibly make the experience better for the user?

In this way, the designer will get a much better impression of the problems that the website must solve.

In addition, it is our experience that physical meetings throughout the process create a good relationship and open dialogue, where both parties can let go of their barriers and talk openly about the project as well as business challenges and opportunities, which can even result in us perhaps can even solve some problems that were not even known.

When ordering a new website, remember: the surface is important, but it’s the deeper layers that create an effective and meaningful web design. By understanding and communicating your needs and challenges, you can ensure that the new website not only looks good, but also works optimally for your company and your visitors.

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