Choosing a website designer is a little bit like shopping for a car. The second you mention you’re in the market, everyone you know has an opinion about what you should get – and more often than not, these opinions tend to contradict one another. What one person insists is critically important, another swears is utterly useless. Eventually, you end up meeting with designers with that same feeling you’d get at the auto lot: with a big list of wants, but no firm sense of what kind of value and performance you should get for your money.

With that in mind, I suppose it’s no surprise that so many clients come to us with half-formed ideas about what they’ll need for their website. Often, they’re completely convinced that what they need is a CSS layout, CMS platform, Java coding, or some other technical feature – even though they aren’t exactly sure what these things mean. What they do know is that someone else used these tools and made some money, or at least a good impression.

As you might’ve guessed, however, choosing technical features for your website before you know exactly what you want it to do is a bit like going to your doctor and asking for a prescription you saw on television. Just because the people in the ad seemed happy with the cure, that doesn’t mean you have the same affliction – or even if you do, that you’ll get the same results. Just like every person’s body is different, so is their business situation. What works for one website can flat line another.

For that reason, my advice for prospective web design clients (whether they are thinking of working with us, or someone else) is to take some time sketching out ideas about what they’d like their site to actually do, rather than which new technique they want to try. Make a list of the capabilities that could help you grow your business, whether you think they’re doable in the short term or not. Once you’ve taken that step, ask a few key customers what they’d like to see, and take a tour of some competitors’ websites. Sometimes these different perspectives can yield big insights.

A good designer or team can take an end goal and find the most efficient way to get you the site you need. But a client who comes in looking for the “latest and greatest” can easily end up with something that’s different than what they really want – or worse, paying for features that they will never need or use.

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