Effective and regular communication with your design team is essential to ensure you start on the right path, execute quickly and efficiently, and produce an ecommerce website that ultimately sells products in big numbers and makes a great profit.
Getting a Quotation.
For a detailed and accurate quotation, based on your exact specification and requirements, your designer will commonly email you a ‘project brief form’ to complete and return. This covers most aspects of the website build including logo, design to the feature list and modules required.
The quality and detail of this form will differ from designer to designer. If you need to send additional details, do so as and when you think of them. However, to help the designer and keep communication simple do your best to get it all in 1–3 emails.
Before you complete the ‘project brief form’ I recommend drawing an outline of the website design as you visualize it on paper, or on your PC using MindMaps, Word or Visio, etc. List the site structure/layout as you see it, together with the feature list and modules required. I personally find it useful to grab a pen and paper and let my creativity flow thru a brain dump. I later transfer this onto the PC in an organized structure and into words for the designer in an email with attachments.
Let Your Designer’s Creativity Flow.
When completing the design aspect of the brief you can be as detailed, or as vague as you wish. What I mean by this is, when you find a good designer be careful you do not give too much information that may get in the way of the designer’s creative skills. I like to give them the site concept, layout, and features required and let them to do the initial mock design selecting colors, etc. and then refine where required to finalize the design.
Site Build Specifics to Email to Potential Designer:
- Detail your goals for the website such as: Concept, Target Customer and Positioning. Essentially, what is the site about, what will it give you and what will it get you?
- Get a delivery date for the mock and live site and list the pre-launch protocol.
- Email 5 websites you like the design of and detail why.
- Detail the design concept (layout, site structure, logo, fonts, and maybe colors, etc.)
- List the features and modules you will need (number of products, product variables, order and admin features, returns, SEO, marketing, reports, etc)
- How many sales/conversions, what revenue do you want daily, monthly, annually?
- Add as many points of your own, as you see fit.
