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Your First Website Contract
Episode 28
In this episode Mike and Matt discuss what it's like to take on your first website contract as a complete beginner web developer, focusing on a small business website refresh.
Segment 1 - Gathering Requirements- We’ve talked about requirements a few times but this whole conversation will be very specific to a typical first site that a developer will have to do for their first project.
- So in this scenario a small business call Happy Coffee has approached you with a request for their old site to be updated. The site is from the early 2000 and is very old, not responsive and has outdated information about their business.
- They would like you to update their online presence with the new web standards and make their site look more modern.
- Your job here is to figure out what the clients preferences are and if they align with your vision for the new site
- Ask them to send you some sites of the their competitors they like and to highlight the specific sections that appeal to them
- Ask them about specific features that you know are common to these kinds of ‘business card/online presence’ type sites.
- Contact forms
- Large cover images
- Services offered
- Map of the location
- Hours of operation
- Small “Our Story” section
- Photo Gallery
- It’s also important to gauge if they have content for you or if you will need to generate content yourself, whether that is images or text.
- This will give you a great starting point for either creating a static site from scratch or choosing a template to fill in and adjust
- Now usually during the more general portion of this process you’ll also be discussing pricing but I’m going to intentionally leave that part out as it’s a whole other can of worms and can be discussed in a separate episode. But usually for a first project, my advice is to be reasonable with your pricing, don’t do it for free but know that this is a stepping stone and the client is taking as much of a risk on you as you are sacrificing price wise for the client.
Segment 2 - Design and Iteration
- Generally when someone wants a basic website, especially when it’s a small business, they’ll want to keep the budget low, cutting down on hours is probably one of the easiest ways to lower the price for a customer, having a basic design allows you to cut down some hours while maintaining quality
- Often times on larger websites clients will want a wireframe, as well as a prototype, or a fully done-up visual design before they’ll approve the look and you can start coding
- When it comes to smaller projects we’ll generally skip a lot of the designing procedure and rely solely on wireframes for a visual aid
- As a brief aside, even some of our larger customers accept wireframes as the basis of their design in order to keep costs down and get the project up and running as quickly as possible
- Typically we’ll make 3-4 different wireframe layouts based on what the customer has requested, often times we’ll get a few reference sites (as Mike mentioned) from them during the gathering requirements stage of our interaction to speed up our wireframe creation
- After showing off the various wireframe designs, we’ll get the client to choose their favourite one, get general feedback if they’re not happy with
Published on 6 years, 10 months ago