Website Projects Communication Rules

There are three vital website projects communication rules to live by.

Website Projects Communication Rule #1

After the initial face-to-face or telephone consultation (a.k.a. discovery session), the majority of the communication should be via email. Our pricing is based upon the assumption that a lot of the interaction between our client’s designated website owner and our project manager is going to be via email. That way we have our client’s thoughts, feedback, etc. in their words which we can review and ask follow up questions on prior to handing off to our designer or developer for follow-through. This helps us to reduce project management time and to put as much of your budget as possible into the design time and development time.

If you have experience with Basecamp and would like to utilize it for all project communications, that can work as well. Please let us know at the start of the project and we will be happy to add you to our internal Basecamp project.

Website Projects Communication Rule #2

When a client provides feedback during the design, development or testing phase of a project, we think the best approach is to conduct a thorough review and send over a punch list in a single email as opposed to sending over 1 email for each issue you find or question you have. Sending over a block of items in a single email lets us know that we can assign whatever work is required to our designer or our developer so they can make the modifications required. When individual items trickle in over a period of days, we never know when it is time to send the work off for follow through. Many times this leads to projects bogging down because neither party is ever quite sure when it is time to move to the next phase.

Working on the feedback in a single block allows us to be more efficient and to keep our costs down, thereby allowing us to quote lower prices for projects. If individual tasks trickle in over a period of time, that is extremely inefficient for us. Logging out of a project, logging into another one, opening files, making edits, saving files, sharing/uploading files and then logging back into the project you were working on probably takes 2X as long in aggregate when compared to fixing 5-6 issues or more in a single session.

Website Projects Communication Rule #3

Specificity is critical. Generalities don’t work. This is your custom website we are building (key word = “custom”). Tell us exactly what you want. Don’t assume that anything about website functionality is obvious. If your expectations include a mega menu and sticky navigation be specific about those requirements.

Website Projects Philosophies

• Website Ownership
• Communications
• Realistic Expectations

Web Design Philosophies

• Responsive Web Design
• Design For Conversions
• Add Content For SEO