Web design and development is a collaborative process and it needs your client’s involvement in all stages. Learning what your potential clients wants in a website takes time and client questionnaires should focus on:
– What the site’s supposed to do for the client.
– What the site will look and feel like.
1. Why do you want to have a new website or why do you want your current site redesigned? An overview of what the general purpose and goal of the web site is.
2. What happens if you don’t have a new website / redesign? Maybe the current site won’t work well in modern browsers or maybe they decided to sell online, and the current site doesn’t allow that.
3. Please describe your organization in a few sentences. This answer could also be used into the Home page or About page.
4. What problems does your business solve and what sets you apart for a specific group of customers? This a question should get the client thinking. Maybe he’s been in business twice as long as any of the competitors or his customers are very dedicated. It would be good to know that the client worked in the industry for 15 years and the website visitors will also appreciate that.
5. Why do you believe site visitors should do business with you rather than with a competitor? Your prospect’s site will probably be compared to a lot of other sites. It’s up to you and the prospect to make the site memorable.
6. Please list the names of five other sites that you like. Why are they attractive to you?
7. Have you researched your online competition so you have an idea of what you do and don’t want on your site? It’s important for the client to decide on the right balance between openness and secrecy.
8. Do you have a slogan or tagline that clearly describes what you offer in terms of benefits or features?
9. Do you have a logo, corporate colors or fonts that should be incorporated? You may be able to make an additional sale if the prospect doesn’t have a logo or doesn’t like his current logo. Will printed materials (business cards, catalog, etc.) be needed?
10. Please describe your potential customers. Pay attention to income, interests, gender, age. If the website is a business-to-business site, what sort of companies is he hoping to attract?
11. What is the budget for this project? If you don’t have a budget please provide a range that you are willing to invest, or how much money you want to make from the site in the first year. If this question still goes unanswered, take the initiative and give a fee range. If the range is too high for the prospect, that’s fine. Your job is to find clients who want to work with you and also have ability to pay what you charge.
12. Who are the decision makers on this project? Ideally, you want to deal with someone who’s in charge, rather than a chain of command.
13. What staff will be involved? What are their roles? Is there a webmaster on your staff? There’s nothing wrong with having more than one person involved in the website process, but have the client appoint a single contact person because this will avoid the conflicting inputs from multiple people. For the webmaster don’t just stop at a yes/no answer. Try to find out more about the skill level of this person.
14. What is your deadline for completing the site? If you have a specific deadline, please state why. This question can provide you with an opportunity to educate the prospect on how long good design takes.
15. What do you NOT want on your site in terms of text, content etc? For example, some use employee pictures all over their sites and others are very secretive.
16. Where is the website content coming from? Who’s responsible for updating it? Does the client have the written content and images/photographs prepared? If not, will he need copywriting and photography services? Is the client willing to commit time/effort into learning how to use WordPress and edit the site?
17. Are you planning to do online sales? What is the product and the payment options you want? How many items do you want to sell online? E-commerce has a lot of moving parts – online order-taking that makes people feel comfortable sharing their credit card information, order-filling, shipment tracking, customer service, and many more.
18. Are you going to need Membership of any kind? Also, make sure you find out if there are any additional features that he would like for the site or things that he would like to add in the future?
19. If you were using a search engine, what words or phrases would you use to find your site? Which of these words or phrases is most important? Encourage them to come up with a reasonable list.
20. Other than search engines traffic, what methods do you have in mind to spread the word about your website?
21. Do you have any social network accounts setup? Does he want links to those accounts on his site?
22. Do you have a mail service account? Will you want to build your mailing list and use it for advertising & newsletters?
23. How do you plan to encourage repeat visitors and referrals? There are lots of ways to keep web content fresh – blogs for example. Is someone able to write fresh content?
