What to do if your the one tasked to get your companies web site re-skinned.

Have you ever been assigned the task off getting a website set up for your company? or maybe you just need to get an existing page updated. When challenged with such a task do you ever get that stomach turning sensation in your stomach that your web designer is going to make you feel like an amateur again?

Ok, these are the extremes but as a web developer I have seen it occur a few times.

When it comes to organising and provisioning a public facing website it can be a little worrying especially when you consider that image is everything in the corporate world. After all how many times have you jumped off a well ranked page in Google just because it looked substandard.

I have listed some of the difficulties that I have seen on both sides of the fence below:

From the clients perspective

1. Your not really certain what you want and this can be paralysing, but you justify it to yourself by saying "Well i'm not a computer programmer so how am I supposed to know what will work".

2. You have a tiny budget and the majority of web design companies will charge for the site screens and designs even before it hits the internet. You really can't afford this right now.

3. Your web design supplier will charge you again if you tell them that you need to change something. Whats worse is that
you think they should have identified any potential issues in the first place.

4. You don't want to keep paying your web design company each you want to ammend a new page or update something you've
already added.

From the web suppliers perspective:

1. You have an impossible client. They don't know what they want. They have given you a outline but when you put together the mockups they constantly change their mind.

2. Your clients come to you for your design expertise and then argue about your decisions, as if they know best. Your argument is that you wouldn't go to your dentist and tell him what he needs to do to treat you. So why do clients think they can.

What can very quickly happen is you get into a 'he said, she said' situation which can often start to turn nasty. From a client customer perspective it can start to get costly and push out further your already fast approaching deadline. The common outcome is that the client will have to make some compromises in order to get the website out on time.

If any of this makes youqueasy then please dont be. I have seen a lot of successful and very smooth web site
projects in my time but the question has always arisen in my mind. There has to be an more efficient approach? especially for the small and medium sized companies that just want a decent chance of being able to market their company online. Startups have the most to lose because they simply don't have the budget and resources if things go wrong.

So whats the solution I hear you ask! Well its really very simple and emoves a lot of the stresses from the equation and that is simply to use a web design company that pre-creates all of its website designs up front. There's a few of them out there but the real benefit of such an method is that you don't need to take the entire design, you can still have it customised to accomodate your company identity, and at the very least you have a something to work with. The other advantage is that you know what your getting straight away and because the design is already created theirs less lead
time and cost.

As an added bonus you don't even need to pay a contract or pay a lot up front if you decide to rent or lease your website. At DriveMySite we do this, we allow clients to pay a monthly fee for their website and if things change and they need to move on then they are quite free to do so without the notice penalties or sign out fees. This means that your investment is essentially zero. So if your being restricted because of some of the items mentioned above then get out there and give it a go. Whats the worst thing that can happen?