Collate Information & Data

The client involvement is essential to a project.  We have good systems in place to gather in the necessary project collateral such as images, brand style guide (when we are using the current brand style guide for the redesign), videos, images and any promotional materials like pdfs to interactive assets such as videos.

We also need to gather the administrative data for web design and development, for example, access to your hosting so we can copy your current website to our client demo web server.

Furthermore, we need to gather information for preplanning, for example, access to data, google analytics, adsense and/or adwords, social media accounts, advertising platforms like Facebook ads, Bing and Google, DoubleClick or AdTech platforms where corporations are using premium systems.

One lamentable statistic remains prevalent, and as web designers and web developers, we don't like to admit hinders our progress.  Client content - which can have a major impact on delivery timelines. The fact remains that people do not like to write new or recommended content for their product and services and yet they are normally adverse to outsourcing that service for a fee.

Surprisingly, in our experience, more and more clients are informed incorrectly by their retained consultants, agencies and project managers about the fact that generally a new sitemap is going to require new content and that content needs to be integrated into the page professionally as part of the development process.

Alarmingly, there appears to be a spike in digital companies out there who are providing clients with a "shell" website e.g. a new design and theme, but letting the clients populate the content of the pages to "reduce labor costs". Yet these companies have provided the clients with a digital strategy which included a full website redesign as the basis for being retained.  Walking away like this to overcome either budget constraints or lack of content from a client is an unacceptable practice. We strongly believe that you need to ensure, upfront, that the client understands the full deliverables that go into a project at the outset.