The following are helpful questions and guidelines to prepare for working with a website developer or designer on a website project. Some projects might be more complex, or more simple, but the following are the typical minimum details to consider for a successful website.

Background & Overview

• Tell me about your business.
• Do you currently have a website?
  • What is the domain name (Website URL)?
• How would you briefly define your product or service offering?
• What problem do you solve for your customers?
• Describe your primary target audience (i.e. who are your clients?).
• Where is your business located?
  • List all locations, if applicable.
• Who are your direct competitors?
  • List their website domain names. if applicable.
  • What elements of these companies and/or their online activity would you like to model after in your redesign?
• What makes you different?

Objectives

• What is your number one objective in this project?
• Do you have any other objectives? Can you rank them by priority?
• Is there anything about your existing website that doesn’t work well?
• Is there anything about your existing website that does work well?
• Is there anything else you would like us to know about your business and this project?

Functionality

• Describe any functionality included in the scope of this project.
  • Including any wireframes, outline, etc. (or send as a separate document)

Project Constraints

• What is your desired date for go-live?
  • Note: Timeline for project completion depends largely on timely receipt of assets/content necessary for the project.

Content/Assets to Assemble

Where applicable. Files can be sent via email, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

• Project scope (depending on the specific project details and budget, we can work with you to create the project scope, wireframes, etc.)
• High resolution logo
• Brand or Style guide (i.e. color scheme, fonts, imagery, etc)
• Website page hierarchy (sitemap)
• Content for pages, articles, blog posts, etc.
• Images
• Testimonials
• Videos or other Media
• Other marketing collateral

Provide developer access to:

• Google Analytics
  • If you don’t currently have an account, we can create one for you. (How to share access?)
• Domain registrar
  • This would be the provider you registered your website domain name with. For example: Godaddy.com is a common domain registrar.
• Current website hosting account
  • Cpanel and/or FTP access, if applicable.

Providing sufficient information about your business and project goals helps to set proper expectations and will allow your website developer/designer to provide you with the results you are looking for.

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