How To Battle Common Challenges In Web Design And Development
Website creation is not something easy that can be achieved in a couple of days. A live project is a result of the work of a team of designers, developers, and online marketing specialists. Sometimes, it can be rather costly to build a site that perfectly reflects all the demands.
As customers, we want to know what we pay for. In order to get a clear understanding of the real value of the services that are included in the process of website creation, it’s important to be in the know about the most common issues faced by all the professionals involved. This includes web designers, developers, and online marketing specialists that are inevitably involved in the process of website creation.
Challenges We Face During Website Creation
Working in the field of web design and development doesn’t require as much creativity as you might imagine. Today, website creation mainly involves a close-knit workflow between clients and teams providing all the necessary services to the clients. Web development is more about creating a project that can make a client happy.
What does this mean? The web design project that you create needs to be within the budget of your customers. It should be ready-to-go according to the schedule or even ahead of time. The stress may come from everywhere, like a client, a client’s clients, your customer’s boss, etc. Keeping this in mind, let’s go through the 5 major factors that a web development team can come across during their work.
№1. Customers Don’t Know What They Want
Before getting to work, a designer and web developer need to meet with clients in order to specify what particular requirements they need to follow and what sort of expectations people may have from the final results of your work.
Unfortunately, often times clients do not have a clear plan or vision for what they want. General phrases such as “I want my website to have a wow-effect on my audience” doesn’t provide a web development team with clear instructions on what should be done to impress the audience.
Before meeting with a client and asking about their expectations, it’s advised to make a brief questionnaire for your customer. It’s always a good idea to ask clients to provide you with several examples of already existing websites that they like in particular. Even if your client provides you with examples of websites with poor or outdated designs, you will have some sort of an idea of what they really don’t want.
Also, ask your client about the functional elements that are a must for the technical side of things. Mind the major goals that your customers want to achieve with their project. For example, this can be a purely educational project or a conversion-oriented web store. The selection of tools, web design elements, and online promotional tricks are based on the simple (or complex) requirements as for the technicalities and functionality of the website.
You can also simplify things a bit and let your clients choose from a gallery of ready-made web design templates. These templates are a quick solution and all of them can be imported and personalized according to personal or business needs.
№2. Customers Are Uncertain about Their Budget
Before getting to work, designers, developers, and marketing specialists need to know how much money they can spend on their project. When preparing for a meeting with your client, you need to come up with a budget range that you can offer to your clients. If your client doesn’t know the average investment in their online project, you can provide them with several pricing plans. It’s always best to lay out the options and give the client some kind of estimation based on their brief.
One more thing that a web design team needs to keep in mind is their customer’s potential. What does this mean? By potential, I mean whether your client has enough budget to start paying for your services from the start and continue working with you in the long term.
If you do not feel certain about your client’s potential, stick with the cost of your services. However, you should always make it clear why your services are worth the cost that you specify on your price list.
№3. Web Design Challenges
Keeping up with new web design trends is one of the major challenges that web designers face regardless of their experience. The world wide web is in the process of constant change – trends come and go. Adapting to these changes becomes really challenging for everyone related to the web design and development niche. As well as being able to adjust to the latest web innovations, web designers and developers need to learn how to work with the changing behavior of their clients.
Making mobile-friendly web designs accessible to users who browse the web on-the-go is another challenge that web designers face these days. In the USA, people spend 51% of their time on mobile devices. It is the responsibility of web designers to make their projects accessible to people browsing online content from a range of devices across the globe. It’s important to deliver all the major features and functionality of a website on small screens, as well as highlight all the important pieces of data in an easy-to-scan manner.
It’s a challenge to provide your visitors with the ease of browsing your data no matter where they come from. It’s an even bigger challenge to create an intuitive navigation structure for all users who access your web page. This is one of the major factors that influence your site’s usability. If a customer finds it difficult to navigate your content, they are likely to just leave and opt for similar services of your competitors where they can find all the necessary data in a few clicks.
№4. Web Development Challenges
Web designers are not the only people who face challenges in website creation. Some challenges come and go, some others keep coming back due to the advancements in web technology. Let’s consider some of the major challenges web developers can face:
With a growing number of web browsing apps, developers need to adjust their online projects to fit those needs. In order to make every online project look stunning in all web environments, web developers need to take care of HTML and CSS for all the available browsing apps.
Cookies are in the center of hot discussions among web developers. Web developers need to fix bugs related to the performance of websites in different browsers. However, users who have deactivated cookies are another challenge for developers. One solution is to make it necessary for users to accept cookies before they can browse the website.
№5. Online Marketing Challenges
While trying to promote their brands, online marketers face several challenges:
Driving the right traffic to their websites. In order to reach wider audiences and let more people know about their brands, online marketers should conduct an audit for their online activity. As part of online marketing strategies, experts need to produce content with a purpose and targeted keywords and analyze which channels will make the promotion of their content more effective.
Creating customer personas and identifying the needs and expectations of target audiences. Tools like Wigzo help marketers create personas and understand true customer needs while testing every single element of content within your site, mobile app or email, analyzing user behavior, and gaining real-time insights on user engagement strategies.
Making the most of social media. Social media has a reputation for quick and free engagement with audiences. However, it can be a difficult medium to oversee because of the nature of different social media channels. In order to keep the audience engaged, you need to post frequently and take your time to communicate with your audience in the ways particular to those platforms and different audiences.
Summing Up
In an effort to create an effective web design project that will appeal to the web community and clients, web designers, developers, and marketing specialists should get ready to face all these challenges. A lot of these issues are interlinked and common for different experts working in the web design field. It’s important to note that they are often industry-specific. With the rapidly evolving web design tendencies, it’s crucial for online experts to work together, understand expectations and work towards mutual goals with clients in light of our tips.
Are you a web designer, developer or online marketing expert? Please feel free to share your challenges with us.
