If you’re a small business leader that chooses to partner with an agency for your web development, you are trusting a very important part of your business to a new person or agency. With that comes the stress of communicating with someone outside your business, and almost always you filling out many forms and creating content for your new site. There can be a point where things can become overwhelming or annoying.
We get that. You’re strapped for time already. You don’t need to spend more of your time working on a website than do already. However, sometimes putting more attention to certain areas of web design can save you much more time in the long run. Developers have common pitfalls that happen in client relationships. Here are the common areas to learn what you don’t know about the developer end of web development:
Going out of contact and not getting content early enough
At some point in the process, you will want to just ignore your agency and focus on your own projects. Going out of contact with your agency will lead to worse and tenser communication on both ends, and delaying the progress on the goal you are working together on.
The vast majority of problems in traditional web design comes from the site owner providing the content that is going on your site in quick enough fashion. It’s a slog to update and generate content for your website, and very easy to keep pushing them off to the backlog. Keeping on track with your tasks in the web redesign process makes things quicker and gives better feedback as we go through our process.
Trusting your strategy over theirs and expecting instant results
No one knows your business like you know it. There will be a very strong temptation, especially as the months go by, to begin dictating your own strategy. However, you hired an agency for their expertise, and while you might know your audience, they know how to reach them. Don’t be afraid to let go a degree of control, in the long run, your business will grow a lot smoother. You hired them for a reason! If you begin to dictate strategy, you will begin to lose the results of the longer term.
Improperly labeling all photos and video
Having all of your current branding and media quickly ready to be send makes the process of putting it on the website much quicker. Your partner will need to see your colors and logos before starting to build the early versions of your site. While you might think it’s obvious which product matches your images, someone who you are partnering with from the outside will have much less of an idea. If you provide a set of pictures without properly letting the web developers know where you are will create a long email string and you having to go back in and letting them know which piece of media goes where.
Takeaways
Trusting your website with another group takes a lot of faith, as well as a lot of work. The partnership that you form could grow your business threefold. However, that is only possible by putting in effort on both parts of the relationship. If you work together and follow these steps, your website will be quicker and you will be happier in the end.
