How to hire a website builder and get the resuLTs-driven site you really want
Part 1 of a series
It’s about trust
Choosing a great website builder depends on how well you communicate just who you are.
Right from the start.
Whether promoting a business, service, artistic work, or profession, your website has a personality and concrete goals. It embodies your history, your successes and challenges. It speaks to a particular audience.
If your web developers get all this, you are on the road to a successful project.
If not, your website sooner or later will fail.
Sure the vendor may have had resounding successes with famous company names. For sure, you and they will pour effort into it.
But none of this will matter if you do not clearly communicate who you are, your audience, your goals, and critically your brand.
(And one more thing: all this applies, even if you decide on using a DIY website platform such as Squarespace or Wix. But that’s a discussion for later.)
Don't fly blind
We know you are excited to just: get to work! You or your staff is teed up and ready. You’ve got a budget… and that wasn’t easy!
Let us be blunt: don’t just “get to work.”
Spend some time thinking through your vendor relationship. Make sure your team is knowledgeable about the basics of building a website. The payoff is great. OK? On board?
In the series, we will teach you exactly how to communicate your website needs, both to a vendor vendor and internally. These needs are typically formalized in a document called a Request for Proposal or RFP.
You will learn how to to manage your website design or redesign process and actual creation, its development.
Without this knowledgeability, you are flying blind, and that never ends well.
Your vendor, on the other hand, dearly hopes to hear this from you, to work with a knowledgeable partner.
We can tell you this because we are constantly on both sides of the table. As a vendor, our success is very much bound up with your vendor management skills.
Let’s begin by committing to a trusting, win-win—and fair—relationship with your vendor.
“If you are choosing a quality vendor—as you should—this vendor is also deciding if they are going to choose you”
Creating trust
Hiring a website vendor is both a transaction and a matter of building trust.
In the transactional relationship, in the buy and sell negotiation, you are a consumer.
In the trust relationship, you are a collaborator. Both sides need the other to be honest, open, and ready with useful accurate information.
As a consumer, you are knowledgeable, your eyes and ears are open in all discussions. That doesn’t make you manipulative, nor it does it mean you play it close to the chest. On the contrary, you say what you mean with complete honesty.
And It means that you know what things are worth.
As a collaborator, you try to provide your vendor with all the information, background, and goals they need to give you what you want. We want to give you realistic time and money estimates for a quality product.
As a consumer, you know that two parties will not always agree. So you will put in place reasonable, and workable ways to reach compromises.
As a collaborator, you’re committed to stick with these compromises, not take them personally, and even celebrate the ability to move the project forward even through turbulence. You can’t always get everything you want. But you can get what you need, or most of it.
Remember this: If you are choosing a quality vendor as you should, this vendor is also deciding if they are going to choose you. They know that if there is not substantial trust from the beginning, projects can quickly degenerate into disaster.
In this business, often through no fault of our own, everyone has been involved in projects gone bad. It’s no fun. It’s expensive. And it’s avoidable.
What you will learn
In this series of posts, you will learn, on a basic level:
How to talk the talk. By that we mean you will understand the technical vocabulary, including some common acronyms.
How to create a request for proposal (RFP) for vendors.
What is actually in the proposal you then get back from a vendor (see also “How to talk the talk”). And how to assess it.
About choosing your website’s “scaffolding:” a host and platform
How a website gets built, step by step
About tools, templates and apps you can use to make the job easier
In short you will become knowledgeable and confident about what is needed to build an effective, results-driven website. And you will be ready for the fascinating, if sometimes turbulent journey of designing, building, testing, and launching your site.
Interested in digging deeper? Talk to an expert.