Posted in bigslickdesign.
When creating your project profile, you are going to want to ask tons of questions to make sure you can deliver a final product that thoroughly meets your customers demands. The way I generally do this is by sending an email to the company’s project manager or the individual you are developing the website for.
You’ll want to stick to a couple of different categories of questions, and while these may vary from project to project, this post should serve as a good outline for what to ask. You want the client to understand that you are simply trying to meet their needs as best you can. They will generally be more than happy to answer all of these questions.
Categories of Questions:
Questions for the Client
Questions about the audience
Questions about the project
Questions about Assets
Questions about Content
Questions about Function
Questions about Budget
Questions about the Schedule
First, you are going to want to ask them about their company specifically.
- What is the mission statement of your company?
- What is the primary goal of your web site? (sales, information, etc.)
- Who are the key decision makers within the company?
- Will there be additional contractors to work with?
- Who is responsible for which areas of the site?
- How will the success of the project be measured (specific metrics, measurable goals, etc.)
- Who is your target audience of demographic?
After the audience has been identified, and the key demographic chosen, you are going to want to know more about that subject.
- What primarily will your audience be trying to achieve or receive from your site?
- What kinds of issues are important to your audience?
- What platforms are they using? (browsers, operating systems, etc.)
- Are there any hardware or software restrictions or concerns associated with the audience?
- What kind of hardware do you expect your audience to be using?
Additionally, you will want to know specifics in relation to the project.
- What is the budget for this project?
- What is the deadline?
- What is the schedule?
- Who is your competition?
- Please list five sites that you aspire to compete with or surpass with your site (additionally, it may be beneficial to include how you want to compete. Traffic, Audience, etc.)
- Are there any branding issues that may be incorporated into the design of the site?
- Is there money in the budget for user testing? If so, how much?
After you’ve obtained some project specific information, you’ll want to know the following.
- Has any work already gone into the site?
- If yes, should this work be included at all costs?
- Will we be doing a redesign of the site or mainly from scratch?
- Do you own or have paid hosting, domains, servers, etc. that would be needed for the site?
- Who will I contact in regards to these assets?
- Who will approve the purchase of further necessities?
Now that you have some information on the general requirements, you will want to know more detailed information such as;
- Who will create the content?
- Who will keep the content updated?
- Who is the person responsible for content at the company?
- How often will the content need to be updated?
- How often will the content actually be updated?
Note: These two last questions, while similar, provide two very different answers. If the site requires many updates frequently, but the company cannot maintain a resource to do this, you can consider putting yourself on retainer for that company in order to do the updates for them.
Next you will want to focus on the functioning aspects of the website.
- Who will host the site?
- Who will handle the MySQL or SQL database for the site?
- Who will analyze the logs to maintain security?
- What are the security issues involved?
- What security guidelines are in place at the organization?
- What is the long-term objective of the site?
- Are their special technical considerations?
Additionally, you need to know how much budget resources the company has for this site, if you are expected to create it.
- Who pays for the hosting?
- Who pays for the maintenance?
- Who pays for the database development and administration?
- Who pays for the scripts or programming for the site?
- Who pays for the visual design of the site?
Finally, you’ll want to get into schedule specific details. These details can include but are not limited to;
- What is the deadline for launch?
- Does the launch coincide with a specific product or service being offered?
- What is the deadline for user-testing?
- What are considered the project milestones within the projects framework?
