Content Marketing Today

5 Essential Questions to Ask Before Hiring Your Next Web Builder

If you don’t get good answers, keep looking.

If you are a big corporation, you may have plenty of in-house talent or can afford to spend a lot of money to outsource the rebuilding of your website.  Even if you are a small organization with a limited budget,  there are lengthy of technically and graphically talented folks who would love to work with you. Even so, you may not get what you need: A website chock-full of relevant and compelling content.

Before you choose the organization based on their technical competence or creative genius, be sure to ask of these five questions because, in the end, it’s all about your content:

1. How will you go about determining what vital content belongs on our website? If you get a blank stare or a long pause on the telephone that suggests they have no idea why content is so important, you should probably move on.  Yes, excellent design and strong visual elements should be part of your website.  But, in the end, the quality of your content is what’s most important to your online success.
2. How will you enable us to create a content-rich, customer-centric website? If the person or organization you are trusting with your brand promise and your brand image online is clueless about content, it will be almost impossible for them to create what your customers and prospects demand.  That is, an online home where they can find answers to their most pressing problems.  Your customers crave great content.  If they don’t find it on your website, they sprint over to a website that contains plenty of the content they really need.
3. How important is it to have a really cool, edgy, eye candy-filled website?  If your perspective Web builder seems to obsess over building something that’s super cool as opposed to something that is super effective with your customers, you might be headed down a dangerous path.  Your Web visitors don’t want cool, edgy, eye candy distractions.  They come to your site looking for answers.  They want those answers quickly. They don’t want to wait for a lot of cool but irrelevant stuff.  After all, when you’re on the hunt for answers, you know that you don’t want to wait either.  Your customers are no different.
4. Will we be able to manage all of the key content and structural elements of the site once you have built it?  It’s just as important to keep a website in tune as it is to keep a guitar in tune.  You can’t just set it once and forget it.  In fact, given the volatility of our economy and the need for continuous adaptation to changing realities, your organization must be able to make both simple and more comprehensive changes on your website without lengthy and expensive efforts by an outside web designer.  You don’t have time to wait to make important changes. Therefore, your website needs a content management system which will enable you to manage almost everything yourselves.
5. Will we be able to post regular news stories and/or blog articles on the website by ourselves? Because current and comprehensive content is so important both to the relevance and to the findability of your website, you need to be able to add new information quickly and easily.  If your prospective web designer, doesn’t buy into that premise, once again, you had better continue the search.

The folks you are vetting must clearly understand the importance of relevant, compelling, and easily updatable content that is enhanced but not overwhelmed by excellent design. If they do, you can be reasonably sure that you will wind up with a website that works well.  But, beware of any prospective vendor who gives you bad answers to these five critical questions.