Many vendors walk in and out with solution that over promises many features, which may not solve customers’ problems. Some vendors would present themselves as consultants and start describing how the future of the web would be, not unlike fortune-tellers.

After several rounds of interviews and extensive studies into existing process flows, we managed to ‘diagnose’ the goals to revamp their website and the various measurable performance indexes of their website. Yet, managing the client’s expectations, which includes how the website would function, the cosmetic issues, the usability issues will be very crucial and needs to be addressed before the first line of programming code is written.

To better communicate with the clients, the client would need to look at a prototype. It could be sketches, storyboards or designs of the system interfaces. While presenting the prototypes to the clients, the clients would be able to assist us in providing any feedback that was missed out from the earlier stages of discussions. These feedback are then collected before the interface design is finalized. The process flows of the proposed revamped are also determined at this stage to make sure that the newly revamped site achieves the objectives.

Sketches of user interface prototypes from an actual discussion, image intentionally blurred to protect the privacy of our clients ;-)

If you are a web developer and is interested to see how we can add value to your existing services, let’s meet up!

How can web developers and web-design freelancers participate in the web blueprint project?

Well, the project is carried out by web developers appointed by our web blueprint customers. Here is an outline of the types of expertise required from draft to interface design:

Second, we will meet up with staff who work in the front-line. They will have first-hand information on feedback from customers. We will then try to cover every region, since each of them will have their own work flow and tool preferences.

Lastly, we will approach their customers directly for feedback. We will also study the website statistics and enquiries submitted by visitors.

For the revamp to be effective, a need-based study will be conducted to gather feedback and suggestions from their various profit and cost channels such as sales and marketing, showrooms, operations, management, information technology and clients.

Our information gathering methods will include brainstorming sessions, interviews, surveys, collection of website statistics and archives, and much more. The process can be detailed in two main stages:

Stage 1 (which will take approximately 14 days)

1) Listing and prioritising of revamp goals

2) Identifying the goal’s conversion rates and its measurables

Stage 2 (which will also take approximately 14 days)

1) Preparing the revamp blueprint document which outlines the project’s requirements, technical specifications, design guidelines, database, integration and other features that will help achieve the goals defined in Stage 1.

2) The materials in the blueprint will be used by appointed web developers as the guideline to execute the revamp. The blueprint can be given to any web developer for the actual site development, but it will create the same result, as planned.

Are you a web developers or freelancers? Register your profile

So, it’s finally time for you to look into building an online presence for your company’s website? Or it’s about time that you revamp the website after hearing from your boss that website is looking really dull for the 999th times.

I would assume that you have a budget for your web development project. I wouldn’t go into how you should come up with this budget, but a budget would give the developer and yourself a rough idea on the scale of the development. You cannot have a RM799.00 budget and ask for everything under the sun. A budget would also allow you to prioritize what features to include in your website, and what features should be implemented in the subsequent phase of your web development pipeline.

Ok, after the Management has approved with your budget, what should you do next? Naturally, the next step is to find a competent developer who can deliver the project fast, cheap and beyond expectations, as unrealistic as that might sound.

So, you post up the jobs, ask around your friends who’s in the IT business and do a search on Google for ‘Malaysia cheap and good web design companies’ or ‘cheap web designers’ or even ‘freelancers who work for free’. And after that, you shortlist 5 of them and asked each them to give you a quote. And you waited for a few days before all the quotes come in, and after looking at the figures you decided to meet with 2 of the cheapest one, and one that quoted the highest (just because you were curious why this particular designer is so different from the rest).

And after interviewing each of them, you finally nail down one company, let’s call them Super SEO Sdn Bhd, and the project begins by paying the web development company a 15% down payment. The project usually begins with Super SEO collecting all the information that you want to put up on to the web for the world to see. All the annual reports, the magazine scans and all your interviews with the newspapers. Next, you also require Super SEO to come up with a few prototypes to give you the ‘look and feel’ of the design. As a matter of fact, you don’t really know what you want, but heck, you can always change your mind, right?

And so it goes on for a few weeks, with Super SEO proposing their revised color scheme for the Nth times, while you continue to browse at your competitors’ website to see what they’ve been up to lately, and to see if there’s any cool features that you might be able to ‘steal’ from them.

If all of the above sounds familiar to you, then you’re very likely to find yourself with a website that did not bring in any positive impact in your sales. Well, at least now your company has a website, and you can include the cool URL on your name card and ironically, other than the URL, there’s really nothing inside the website that you could really shout about to your potential visitor. You begin to wonder why did you spend RM8,000 on the web development project.

My advice? Just get a domain name and have a single page with your company’s address on it. That will probably only cost you about RM150.00. Nothing to shout about either, but it’s going to have the same impact on your name card.

Hold it, now you’re saying that you are really, really serious about building your online presence and how else, other than the method explained above, can you go about it?

Who’s the Architect?

Here’s what I’ll propose, and I think this would definitely work much better than the commonly-used method illustrated earlier.

First, you must know what you want out of the website, and how the website will affect your business’s bottom line. No web developers on this planet can give you this answer, simply because they are just that- web developers. They know nuts about your business, and probably won’t be interested to listen to you brag about your rag-to-riches stories.

Contrary to what you may have been told, if you are going to build a website that works for you, the key architect of the site is none other than you and the people in your company. If it’s a revamp of your existing website, the feedbacks that you’ve gathered from previous visitors, clients and the web statistics will also be an important source of information in working out the blueprint of your web development project. You should be the person deciding the metrics you want to benchmark the website with. How many visitors are you expecting after the revamp? What keywords do you want to position your website with? Which languages do you think you should translate your site into? Which countries are most likely search about your industry and what kind of search engines do they use? Do you have a department in your company that would be able to tap into the company’s web resources and improve their service delivery?

And if you still think that your web developer is going to do all these for you, you’d better rethink your purpose of developing/revamping the website.

The Blue Print is All You Need

So, it’s really not rocket science. What I am really suggesting is that you need to first identify your web development’s need. Figure out the benchmarking metrics of your website and the conversion ratios you are hoping to accomplish. Let everyone in the company chip in and contribute in the planning phase. Get the blueprint of your project done and make changes whenever a better idea or suggestions come along. It’s 80% cheaper to change the features on the drawing board than after you’ve got your website up on the net.

It’s very tempting to hire a web developer based on their portfolio and their client base. Yes, these are important attributes which will help you determine whether they can deliver what you want, how you want it and when you want it. Yet, it’s even more important to engage a web developer who listens to your needs and can help to ensure your blueprint is realistic and achievable. An experienced web developer who can help you to come up with the final blueprint can also dramatically reduce your risk. The blueprint will usually only be a fraction of the entire project cost, but it’s also the foundation of the entire project. With this blueprint, you will have a clear idea of what to expect from the website and you can even bring around this blueprint to any web designing companies which can execute the blueprint for you, exactly the way you want it. Again, this can help to further reduce your development cost and also to ensure that you will not be ‘surprised’ with the end product.

Conclusion

A website is becoming one of the most important tools in an organization’s public communication strategy. You can deliver an impressive message by providing the information that your visitors are searching for with the least effort or you can be turning off potential customers with a few badly designed product purchasing forms.

Whatever it is, I would like to emphasize again my point: Your website is your business

Posted by Yowchuan, Meshio.com: A Case for Your Web Development Project

We don’t have golden finger to make every business successful. But, we have always something to share with them and to help them understand what is Visitors and Conversion. We learn from our customers too when we share.

A Quick Tips for Website Owner
Online business guide

The overwhelming response from our customers after receiving our email updates are making our days!

“Great stuff here, very useful for us as a starting company”

“This is very timely information”

“Good one, keep them coming”

“What about tips for getting higher conversion rate?”

“Thanks for sharing such valuable information again”

“Thanks, good info for me.”

“It’s a very interesting write-up”

“Thanks for the info”