Web.Search.Social: The Marketing Magazine For Smart Businesses
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When you hire a developer, you should be thinking beyond the rote development of your site to its potential. There are plenty of people who are proficient in HTML, CSS, SEO or [insert acronym and/or technology here] but that doesn’t mean they’re going to build you a successful website.
This is not the same thing as “who’s in charge” or “who’s the boss”. And I mean this in a very literal sense, not as in, “is my web developer a responsible person who can get the job done?” I mean, very specifically, when something goes wrong, when there’s a problem, a delay, an issue, a bug or some other unforeseen event, ask yourself this: who you gonna call?
You’re ready to take your web presence to a new level and you’re looking to hire a company – the right company – to help you do it. But it can be challenging to navigate through the differing opinions, ideas, processes and price points of competing web development companies and almost impossible to make an apples-to-apples comparison when there are so many widely diverse options available.
Choosing a web developer isn’t easy, whether you’re just starting out and need a website to begin marketing your business online, or you’ve been through the ringer before and the thought of muddling through again, even in the name of a much-needed redesign, is enough to make you wish the internet had never been invented.
As a web marketing agency we are called upon by our clients to create and execute ideas, but many times, we work alongside the marketing departments of those companies and are called on to offer our opinion on who would be a good hire for their internal staffing needs. Here are three of our suggestions based on our experience.
Hooooold on a second… weren’t there supposed to be five steps to planning? How did “building” make it into the planning steps when it should come after? Ha! Bet you know that building could be part of planning, too. Of course, this is building in a different way than you might expect.
The planning process is a little like that old song where the shin bone’s connected to the knee bone… and the knee bone’s connected to… um, something or other. Fortunately you don’t need to remember your anatomy but you will be building a connection with your wireframe, which you just built to connect with your sitemap.
Once you know what pages will be on the site, the next step is to figure out what’s going to be on those pages. This is where the wireframe comes in, sometimes referred to as “information architecture”. It’s still a paper-and-pencil exercise, but it’s far more detailed and it builds on the previous two steps.
Building a sitemap is a good old fashioned paper-and-pencil exercise. Ok, maybe a good old-fashioned keyboard-and-mouse exercise. Whatever your tools, it is a drawing phase. You will need to sit down with your developer and decide exactly what your site structure is from a high-level perspective.
It’s common – and unfortunate – practice to start building a website based on a conference call and a couple of notes about colors, pages and content. With so many DIY web tools that make the process sound as simple as a drag here and a drop there, many businesses fail to recognize the power of planning.
