Choosing the right professional website services vendor for your company is a big decision. Two of the biggest and lesser known factors in choosing a professional website services vendor are:
1) Project Management
2) Communication
Of course the aesthetic quality of the website is very important, but you'll be hard-pressed to get what you want with communication breakdown and poor project management on your web developer's part.
Watch the video chat to learn more about picking the right professional website service for you.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video on professional website services. I'm Chad Hill. And I have Adam Stetzer here with me. Adam, how are you doing? I'm good, Chad. Good afternoon. Yeah, we're diving deep into professional website services. And I'd like to hear your thoughts on what the selection criteria are for finding an outsourced vendor or partner to help you with website design, website development projects.
Yeah, I think there's four things that I look at when I'm talking or thinking about professional website services. The first one is that they have a formula for gathering requirements because if you don't get the requirements right up front, you're inevitably going to have a failed project at the end. So that's an important place to start when looking for your professional website service.
Yeah, and I think people probably underestimate that in their website service. They probably think of the quality of the website services first. But you're saying the project management and communication are really going to sink the ship before it leaves the port?
Yeah, exactly. And that sort of is a good segue into the second one, which was project management, because once the requirements are done, really, being able to effectively manage the requirements and getting them completed-- because what we see a lot with websites is that people build them, and then the end client doesn't really get around to providing feedback. And they're sort of left in this lingering state for weeks and months sometimes. So having a good project management process in place is going to really make sure that projects are started and finished on time. And then, the third thing, which I think is where people typically are starting, is the development and design. But you need to make sure you've got that built into the process. And I don't want to underestimate or under-emphasize how important that is. But that is also an important part of picking your professional website services.
Then, the final one, for me, is making sure that you have a good support mechanism because what happens a lot-- there are teams of people out there that are very much focused on design and development. But they all don't like the support side of it. So you want to make sure that when you're picking a professional website service that you pick a professional website service that's thought through the support side of the business.
And a lot of times, that means that maybe the senior developer or senior designer isn't the one handling the support requests. But rather, they have, maybe, a more junior person who can handle those tasks and has a defined service level on when a support task comes in, what the process is for getting that resolved. It may not be that it gets resolved on the first day. But there's a clear feedback mechanism for sizing that up and setting it on a calendar of when it's going to get done.
So those are the four things I really think are important when you're looking at a professional website service.
I think that's solid. And I think, the real professional website service teams that are in the web design business, they understand how complex these projects are. And they'll help educate you.
I think it's easy to underestimate how many moving parts go into building a website. People seem to have a hard time grasping that. And they tend to think making small changes may be easy when, in fact, they aren't. And sometimes they are. But the real pros really help you think that through and help you visualize and gather all that up front so that you're not making changes late in the game, which becomes very difficult and costly, and is ultimately where frustrations tend to happen.
