Choosing the right design & development partner for your business.

Before we dive in, I just want to mention that, being a part of the design community, we collectively, only want the best for you, us, and our ecosystem that is built on design. Design is all around us, everywhere. It is our responsibility as such, to help produce the best possible and most pleasant experiences for customers and consumers. Sure, there are a lot of proud, ego-driven, inexperienced, self-proclaimed designers and developers. Every industry has that type of people. But for the most part, I believe in the creative community and our obsessive need to make things look great, and be accessible, usable, and enjoyable to all. And I think you, as a newfound business owner, would want the same for your customers. Great design makes for a wonderful consumer experience. It helps to ensure a long and prosperous venture for you.

Now let’s do this.

Here are a few things that may end up happening.

1. You will enthusiastically begin designing your website yourself. You will watch tons of Youtube videos, you will read through DIY tutorials and when you feel like a pro you will install a theme from WordPress … and the end result will look nothing like what you bought. I won’t bore you with what comes next, but let’s just say you will be very disappointed and aggravated for quite some time.?I have seen cases where people who tried to build a site themselves, took so long that they totally lost the will to continue with their business, or missed their traction opportunity due to the delay.
2. You will spend time building a website. Carefully research, copy and mimic other websites that you find to be great. You will grind day after day for months perfecting it, thick and thin until it is completed. You then launch and proudly share your baby with the world. You might even guilt your friends and family into sharing it because, well why wouldn’t you? I would. But then time goes by and you feel like you are not getting any traction or business out of your self-built website. Sales are simply not coming in, no visitors…crickets!

Make a plan and work backward to achieve it.

Before you reach out and begin the process of hiring outsourced designers and developers you must have a clear goal. Understanding what you want to achieve in business and how good design, a website and an app play into that equation will contribute to achieving your goals... Don’t bottle up these thoughts inside your head. Write them down, all of them. Go for a walk, watch a movie and come back to them later. When you return, ask yourself,?“What do I want to achieve by the end of the business year or five years from now?”?It could be anything from having a steady cash flow, gross sales of a million dollars, 10,000 customers, living debt free…whatever. Now work backward and set up a monthly plan listing the steps you will need to take to achieve your goal. For example, if my goal is to have gross sales for the year be a million dollars, how much should I be averaging in monthly sales to achieve it? Daily? How does having a website help me? Well if you are looking to sell online then the answer should be clear….

Now that you have a bit of clarity as to what you want your business to achieve, set some realistic, attainable milestones, and ask yourself how you are going to make it happen. Hire a professional … oh that’s right!

When it comes to selecting a vendor and design/dev partner, as a small business owner I would say that your main criteria and the deciding factor will probably be price, followed by their portfolio, experience, and trustworthiness.