My guess would be most web designers learn this lesson pretty early, but I’d like to add it to the Best Practices canon anyway. You design web sites all the time for all kinds of clients. As a result, you’ve built up a good deal of knowledge about what does and does not work in a web browser. Surely a customer will be only too happy to bow to your extensive wisdom in this arena and give you free reign to create the site that you know will best meet there needs, right? You’ll create the perfect site, hand it over to them, and everyone will be thrilled about the end result.

The first problem with this notion is it assumes that your expertise with web sites in general translates to expertise with web sites in your customer’s particular industry. Even if you have done many sites in that industry, it is naïve to assume that your customer has the same business goals, niche markets, and unique selling proposition as all of your previous customers.

That’s why it is important to get feedback from your customers throughout the development process. What aspects of the business should be emphasized on the home page? Don’t just take a stab in the dark. Ask your client.

Once you’ve sketched or mocked up a layout for the site, shoot an email off to your customer. Find out what they like and what they don’t. It’s so much easier to make changes now before you start coding.

If you stay in contact with your customer throughout the process, the end result will be a site that makes them happy. The word of mouth they generate with other people is going to be that you gave them exactly what they were looking for. They will tell their friends to do business with you.

Do you think you’ll get many referrals if you give them a site that you “know” is exactly what they need, but isn’t at all what they want?

filed under: Dealing With Clients, Project Management