VIDEO – 3 Questions To Ask Your Web Developer

Video Transcript

I’m Rob, this is Liam we are from Frogspark and today we are going to talk you through 3 questions you should always ask your web developer.

Yep, so it’s important to have a nice relationship with the people that are doing your website which is why we have come up with this video.

It’s hot… it’s warm… it’s very hot…

Who is going to be working on my website?

Question number 1 is “who is going to be working on my website?”. So generally in a web project, you’ve got a designer and you’ve got a developer. Designers are very visual, they think about the user journey and how engaging the site is going to be and how they will navigate it, how it will compress down to mobile and things like that. Whereas a developer, generally you know, aren’t very visual. They should be thinking about the code, thinking about creating the clean code, creating it so that it’s nice and fast, creating it so it’s nice and smooth on all browsers and on all devices and things like that. There is often a bit of a mix up between the two but I always think it’s better for people to stick to their strengths.

Yeah definitely so like Rob said, it’s important to distinguish the difference between the designer and the developer. The developer will take the designs that have been made by a graphic designer and make sure that the code for the website is nice, make sure the page speed is spot-on, make sure it’s fluid across different viewports whether that be a laptop screen, a big screen or even a going down to mobile and tablets. That’s generally what the developer is there for, they are also there to make sure the content management system behind the scenes is well built and it’s easy for you to update content because that can always be a nightmare. And then on a designer perspective, you just need to make sure you communicate well with them to get your company or your branding across so they can design a nice site for you.

Do that, you’re onto a winner. I’m getting hotter… I’m hot, are you hot?

How do you go about requirements gathering?

So question number 2 is “How do you go about requirements gathering?”. It’s really important that the company you go to for the website really understands your business. So ask them about what their requirements gathering process is and their discovery phase of the project because that is where they are going to find out about you, your business and what you want for the website so that they can meet your expectations at the end. So it’s all about them getting into your business really, finding out about you, your services, your main user, what your main goals are on the website and kind of speccing that out from the off.

I mean, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to any website, I don’t believe anyway, you can get a template but we are very much bespoke in the things that we do. We get a really deep understanding of you, your business and most importantly the people coming to your website so your customer essentially; what are they going to want to see and what is going to make them get in touch with you or purchase a product should you be an e-commerce website. So yeah, just get a real understanding, meet the team working on the site has the right team in place, and they understand you to a deep enough level where they can make a website that’s going to work.

…It’s still hot, it’s definitely still hot. Warm.

How do you monitor performance?

The final question is: “How do you monitor performance?”. So with any website you should be monitoring performance, it shouldn’t be something that is just built and then left to go stale so the things you should be looking for is a team that installs tools like Google Analytics, they should offer to show you around it. Look at different pages, look at how to monitor performance, look at how different pages perform and which pages are getting a higher bounce rate, what pages are getting visited most, how long are people are staying on the site. You should be doing this on a regular basis and from that, you can just make sure your website is suited to your business and it’s going to generate more and more leads for you.

Yeah definitely, I think it’s important to ask the company from the outset that question so that you don’t just get handed a website at the end and then just be like “ok yes we have a new website… now what?”. Those initial goals you set from the outset, you need to be making sure that the web developer is implementing the kind of tools and showing you how to find this information out so that when it does launch, you can evaluate and monitor how close you are to your goals and if any kind of improvements need to be made to the website and things like that. So it’s always kind of important to have that relationship with a web company once the site has been launched as well.

And that’s it, again I hope those 3 questions have helped you, but if you do have any more questions feel free to pop over to our website or follow us on Twitter @FrogsparkStudio. And don’t forget if you have a website by us, we do all them 3 things. We do, surprise.

Cheerio, see you later.