quid-di-ty [kwid'te] -n., pl.

The following sections give some pointers about what questions a web designer might ask you at your first meeting. Forewarned is forearmed, so it may be useful to answer as many of the questions here as possible. This will help you get a concrete idea of the exact purpose of your website.

The best place to start is with your competition! Know your competition, and have a look at what they are doing online. If your competitors don't have websites, congratulations, you're already one step ahead of them. If they do have a website have a good look at it. Imagine this is your site what parts do you like, and which parts would you want to change or replace if you were to have the site rebuilt. Is there anything you or your customers would need on the site that isn't currently available on this website?

Your Message

The next thing you need to do is decide on your company message. The internet is an excellent medium for getting your message across to people who may want to hear it, but the web is filled with so much information, if your message is not concise and to the point it may get lost in all the noise. The best way to think about this is that you have a message which you want your clients to hear. You can write the best speech possible, but if no-one can hear it, it will do you no good. A web designer can build you a platform from which you can transmit your message, and from where you will be noticed by the people you are trying to reach. This platform works best when it is tailored to be accessible by your target audience.

Your clients

Nobody knows your business or your potential clients better than you! When Quiddity Web Design get involved with a project we do our best to understand the type of people who are most likely to be visiting your website, but our research and assumptions can never match your business experience. For this reason we always try to involve our clients in the early stages of the design process to help us provide the best fit between website and user. The more you know about your client the more the website can be designed to fill their needs, and the more effective the website will be in conveying your message. There is no point designing a cutting edge website if your message is aimed at people who don't use computers very often and are easily intimidated by new technology. On the other hand, if your target audience is used to handling the latest technology, their interest won't be captured by a text only static website.

Site Content

For these reasons it can be advantageous to have the textual content written, or at least roughly sketched out before meeting with the web designer. It helps to create a foundation from which the basic website layout content can be developed. For example, if your message divides neatly into say five subjects, each of these subjects may get it's own page. If your message cannot be neatly cut into sections the number of pages may be different or this may lead to a completely different website navigation plan more suited to your individual situation.

Try also to list exactly what subjects you want your website to cover. Think about these subjects and try to define how the information may change over time. Some information may change weekly, whereas some information may never change over the entire life of the website. Depending on how often information changes it may make it more viable to write the code for those sections in a way that aids the update process.

This exercise may also reveal some subjects that you know will need adding in the future, but at this point are not required. Knowledge of possible future website expansion can also help when it comes to making design decisions, as the evolution of the site over time can also be taken into account.

Graphics and Photos

A large part of a clients first impressions about your site will be decided by the initial visual impression. If you already have company graphics prepared for the website, such as a logo that is being used on all your other marketing material, or perhaps photos of your products, try to provide them at the highest quality possible. For instance, if you are providing photos, shoot them at as high a resolution as possible. This will allow your web designer to crop them and compress them to look their best when they are placed on your website. If the quality is too low it will degrade the look of the entire site, poor looking images can severely damage a first impression, whereas a good quality image is much easier to manipulate in terms of file size and compression.

You also have to ensure you obtain the appropriate legal copyright permissions to use any graphics or photos you want to use. It is against the law to use the intellectual property of others without their express permission. A good rule of thumb is to get permission from the owner in writing setting out exactly how and where you can use their property.

Conclusion

The above may seem like a lot of work, but here at Quiddity Web Design we see the design process as a team effort between designer and client. Working together we can create a website that far exceeds what either of us could create working separately! For example, it seems counter-productive to spend a lot of time doing research into your target audience, when we can go straight to the source and get the most accurate information: namely you and your experience dealing with your customers on a day to day basis.