You’ve chosen a design agency, now what?
Here’s part 3 of Remedy’s presentation delivered at the Not For Profit Technology Show last November. To get up to speed, see part 1, preparing a website design brief and part 2, choosing the right design agency
So, you’ve gone through the pitch process and chosen the ideal agency to design your website, but how do you make sure your project stays on track? Stick to these steps and you shouldn’t go too far wrong:
1) Agree a realistic project schedule
“As soon as possible”. That’s the answer we invariably get when asking the question, “When do you want your new site to go live?”. That’s all well and good, but bearing in mind you will have to be part of the process, you need to take into account your own workloads and timescales. How quickly can you collate draft copy? How quickly will you and your team be able to agree and sign-off the various design stages? A website schedule has to be workable both ways, so try to avoid setting unreasonable deadlines that will put unnecessary pressure on you or your agency.
2) Get the site architecture right
Get the site map and functional spec right and don’t proceed with the design process until you are 100% sure everyone has agreed what your new site is going to do, it’s overall structure and how the user is expected to navigate their way around. Although not always totally practical, one simple rule that will make your site user-friendly is if you are never more than two clicks away from where you want to be. Once the architecture is agreed, then you’re into the design concept stage.
3) Insist on choice
Unless your design agency has to stick rigidly to an existing page template or hard-and-fast design guidelines, you should insist on a choice of design routes (budgets permitting of course). For the initial concept stage, a Home page and one other page should be enough to base your decision on.
4) Allow room for creativity
You will most likely have seen websites that you admire. By all means, share these with your design agency, but try to avoid being so prescriptive that you stifle the designer’s own creativity. Try to remain open-minded at the concept stage and try not to force a design aesthetic on your agency that leaves no room for experimentation and means you end up with a website that looks like everyone else’s.
5) Judge creative work against the brief
You have gone to the trouble of agreeing a great creative brief (see part 1 for details), make sure it is at hand when judging the design concepts. It’s at this point that personal likes and dislikes can get in the way of rational thinking. If the design concept answers the brief, then it probably isn’t far wrong. Of course, you and other key stakeholders need to be happy with the design, but as soon as the decision process starts to get tricky (which it often does when there is more than one person involved), the brief will add clarity.
6) If you don’t like it, say so
You will have to live with your website for quite a while. All of your clients/supporters/service users/staff/volunteers/competitors will look at it and have an opinion. It will probably be one of the most important elements in your marketing mix, so you’ve got to be happy with it. If there’s something you don’t like, make sure you say so at the concept stage, but equally, you need to say why. Is it a personal dislike, is it inappropriate for your brand’s personality, is there a lack of visual focus…? Whatever your objections, talk them through with the design agency so that they can understand your issues and find a better solution.
7) Ask for other opinions
Even if you are very single-minded and are convinced the design concepts are spot-on, it doesn’t hurt to get other opinions. Whoever you wish to confer with, before they give you their ha’penny’s worth, make sure they understand the brief. The website design should be judged with a proper understanding of what you are trying to achieve and who you are talking to.
By this stage, you should have a website design that meets the basic criteria of the brief and that you are happy with. If you’re not completely there yet, it may be a case of tweaking one of the design concepts. But all of the preliminary work in getting the brief right and choosing the most suitable design agency should have made getting to this point as smooth as possible.
With a couple of pages designed to everyone’s satisfaction, your agency will now need to design other page templates that can be applied across the whole site. Oh, and by the way, have you supplied all of the copy and other content yet? If not, this is the point where the schedule can grind to a halt.
So, now we go from the design stage to the build. Definitely not the time to take your eye off the ball. There are some simple guidelines that you can follow, but that will have to wait for another blog post.
In the meantime, please let us know if you have found this series of posts useful and of course, if you have any tips to add that will help anyone through the website design and build process, we’d love to hear from you.
Tags: Institute of Fundraising, IoF, Not For Profit Technology Show, web design, website, website design, working with a design agency