Making a choice is daunting. Making a thousand when you thought you were making a few, will leave you exhausted half-way into realising you are committed to making them and more likely to give up trying to make the right ones.
You wouldn’t get on a cab before knowing where to go, would you?
I wouldn’t, unless I am being chased.
If you aren’t, hopefully, you get to choose how expensive it should be just by comparing, checking routes or even play copilot with your driver. You can also get on the first one, give them the address and relax. We understand that one might be cheaper than the other, by a little or by a lot, but not enough to overthink it.
That’s a simple analogy, but to extrapolate it to web development, we would need to think of the journey as a six months long trip from southern Spain to the Russian tundra. That’s when you realise that because it won’t just be one ride, most of us won’t even leave the house until we have at least written down and booked most of the stops with rough schedules, costs and contingency plans. It will definitely not be a one day job, but with even with the initial outline, you’ll have a much better idea of your options: grab your backpack and leave, search all week for flights, train tickets and hotels or get a journey planner to do some of it, or all of it for you.
That’s a much better analogy
Choice paralysis requires good advice from someone you can learn to trust
Being confident with your choices when the problem is more complex will be difficult no matter what. You either take on yourself to do a good amount of research or you risk being fooled by a flashy deal or a proposal that ultimately leaves you unsatisfied upon delivery, if it delivers. The naked truth is that thinking of how you approach marketing or a website for you or your business comes with huge risks of unexpected issues, errors, blind spots or lack of foresight.
On the other hand, if you have to do most of the work beforehand to explain and obtain exactly what you want, micromanaging things and getting caught up in the details, you might as well choose a free hosting or a cheap subscription service that you can cancel if needed, get a template and make an attempt to be a web developer or designer. At least to start with, doing just that even when you have a big budget, is my usual advice for most clients. The reason: giving up on it, even if very early on, leaves you with some understanding on the process, examples of what you want and want no, and the ability to get things rolling quicker with someone that spots the effort you made and can analyse it correctly. So if you don’t have time to read it all, take this with you: Start the project exactly as if you ARE gonna have to finish it yourself, then feel good quitting whenever it becomes too much and know that you did it at the perfect stage to start engaging with professionals, knowing the effort it will take and your own limitations in the process, and give it to someone with the empathy to learn from it.
The right person to work with will offer a safe place to land
As with everything, the key is that balanced approach you will find while trying. What really unlocks your full power, is finding people that have the patience and temperance to explain those things first, discuss what you have done to understand what you wanted, reveal the pros and cons of the approach and argue things if necessary, while only counting as work the effort of outlining, managing and producing the resulting project, not the effort of earning the trust and creating good rapport. Whichever language that translates into, getting that good feeling while defining the process benefits all parties, as it becomes the shortcut to less back and forth, being comfortable bringing things up as they arise, with the added bonus of increased productivity and better results as you fine-tune things overtime. Speaking the same language doesn’t guarantee good communication. Whether is daily overview emails, weekly catch ups over coffee or Slacking back and forth when you are working on the tasks, each client will expect different things that they don’t even know themselves.
Where research stops and communication starts
Going back to our analogy, a journey planner might only ask for an outline of the stops you want to make, the time and the budget you have and sell it on how simple it seems. But you are risking spending time later on putting caveats on-the-go to those simple key selling points. Changing things will require them to replan the whole trip over and over, and the process will restart each time it happens, eroding the initial euphoria until it becomes a chore.
You might decide to throw some feedback on that initial proposal and add some opinions on the type of hotels, transport and even activities you don’t enjoy, thinking this time around will be the last, less likely to get it wrong. But if it all becomes an unachievable quest, the person working with you will grow frustrated in the process and lose interest in squeezing each penny finding good deals as they things might continue to change if they don’t get it spot on this time. And viceversa, if they don’t make you aware of the trade offs before you require something, you might grow tired of the side effects of each decision instead of satisfied that you made the right choices.
And no matter what, it turns into an actual negotiation in which the only decision you should be making before you both start talking, is when do you each prefer to discuss things. At the beginning, taking more time and making it cheaper or at the end, getting results faster but paying the price on every oversight. Why risk arguing over misunderstandings instead of the actual project?
That is the one choice every client should make
Deciding to not put too much time or effort in deciding every minutia makes perfect sense for those whose time means money, enough to pay for that uncertainty or even more.
On the other end of the spectrum, if what you need is to stay on budget, then you might as well be in control by giving more time and pause to each exchange of information, spreading the research to understand what you agree to, choosing how exactly you get the most of yours and their time and the best result.
Expectations are our own worst enemies
We lean on assumptions and expectations to navigate life, simplifying mundane things based on our experience, but if used for everything it becomes the Trojan horse that will surprise you at the last minute, revealing they came from different places that often times do not extrapolate exactly.
Every good project should start by clarifying exactly that. The expectations first, the level of involvement second and the forms of communication needed from both sides last, regardless of what the project entails. Because a client and a professional that understand this, with the trade-offs and gets on board will enjoy both the process and the result.
For the ones with enough money and time to let developers and designers work and pay for iterations and tests, setting those as your expectations from the get go might look like asking to be charged more, but in earnest, it means you can focus on setting milestones with fixed costs and in increments, and making them aware of the expectations periodically as you find what you want, pivoting accordingly through prototyping and making their tasks simply approving and disapproving, without any hassle or friction, rinse and repeat until done.
For the rest, go on, I have some quick tricks for you.
Creating your website should be just as fun as planning your holidays, or more
Because it should make you enough money to go on holidays, more than once. This are things you ought to do if you aim for cheap, good, and as fast as it can:
Setting goals, working backwards through them to discard things that will bloat the initial costs and leave them for Stage 2, cutting the fuff.
Describing your audience, the actions you want them to take for each segment and checking if you are being too narrow, or too lose, and prioritise accordingly.
Researching competitors and checking what you like and what you don’t, without copying them outright, while finding what makes you unique and it is worth showcasing up, front and center.
Making mood boards out of screenshots, even if they are not competitors, writing what you think they will be good for your case while expecting to be challenged in those preconceptions.
Listing the images, marketing material and information required for your project to decide if you need photography, videography, graphic design or stock images can do the right job.
Writing a list of your services, polish how you categorise them as much as possible in the process, when you see them all at once and you spot their defects before your clients do. Also write a snippet of text for each of them to explain them in a nutshell with the tone of voice you want the website to have, deciding early if you can do it the bulk of it yourself or you will require a good copy writer to help you with it.
All that can sound fun or a struggle, but better to do as much as you can on each of those points before you sit down with a professional than to find out they will still ask you to do it yourself before they can quote, or worst still, charge it as extra after you have paid for just a website.
If you get to the web developer or the designer with all those notes, and check if they are willing to go through it with you to unravel it into the final product. That is the biggest benefit of it. It will serve as the chemistry meeting that, even if you don’t work with them, will help you shape it into what we call in the industry, the brief.
It should all feel exciting, and the people you work with should make each of those steps taken feel meaningful, whether they had flaws in them or not. Because they all help shape the final output and the process, if they know where and how to look.
Look for people you want during the journey, not because they will get you to the destination
By the time you finish a project, you will go on to use it for what it was meant for. That’s when you stop needing the developer or the designer, barely reaching out to them to start a new one, or for period maintenance or tweaks. So make sure you are choosing people not for what they can achieve only, but for how they will do so as well.
A lot of professionals will offer shortcuts and tricks that might do the trick for now, but will incur in a penalty long after their work is done, leaving you to pay for the redo. Sadly, the only remedy is to make sure whoever you talk to, reveals them upfront as everything comes at a cost. If they don’t, feel free to ask for a second opinion, incorporating those questions in the brief and getting surprised once you double check and find out things are never as easy as they seem in web development and design.
The price should be the last thing on your mind while discussing all this, as by the time you get the quote, it will be so justified and broken down into affordable stages, that you will be confident to go ahead and book it.
And obviously, treat everyone with the respect to let them show them their expertise without doubting it. The more you listen to their advice, without getting caught up in them as your only option, the more you will learn by comparison.
You can put value on anything, but only with the right attitude
I never see a client choosing someone else as a direct reaction to me. Things are not compatible by default. If I am genuine and offer good free advice they can learn from and take on, I know eventually they might come back to me when they are ready to work with someone like me, and not before. And that is a win win for everyone.
A big part of my job is to find the right clients, not just clients, so I wouldn’t be doing it right if I didn’t account for that time when I am looking leads and expect them to be profitable from the very first word we exchange. Positioning myself as an expert is beneficial to me, regardless of when they can utilise that expertise, that is why free consultancy is not altruistic but necessary, in my opinion.
That is the advice I want to leave you with, as my experience has made me realise, these things are not as obvious as they might seem.
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