Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.
Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.
Each of these processes is important, and little inefficiencies in any of them can cause massive delays in finishing your outputs and accomplishing your targets. That is why you must ensure that your operation is organized and streamlined as much as possible.
In this guide, I will share with you six tried and tested strategies that you can use to streamline your web design agency.
Let’s dive in.
1. Use a reliable collaboration platform.
The process of designing a website for a client requires a lot of internal and external back-and-forth correspondence. Your team communicates with your client regarding edits. Your senior designers instruct your junior designers, while engineers, content, CRO and SEO specialists provide additional input, etc. With all the back-and-forth communication that comes into play, the process can get pretty chaotic — that’s when your agency starts missing deadlines or, worse, clients.
To help improve how you collaborate as a team (and with your clients), what you need is a reliable collaboration platform like Duda.
To begin your collaboration, Duda allows you to add users to the platform. You can then set the level of access for each user and user role according to dozens of parameters. This is where you add your clients and your team members so everyone can collaborate from within Duda without stepping on each other’s toes.
Another nifty feature that Duda has to increase the efficiency of your collaboration is its “Site Comments” feature. From Duda’s site editor, users can add comments to the elements/sections of the web design.
Duda even notifies the users involved in the project when comments are made. Once the assigned staff makes the adjustments, he or she can mark the comment as “Resolved.”
With these features, Duda helps you track the progress of the design more efficiently. You can also prevent miscommunication internally as the exchange of feedback becomes clearer.
2. Prepare an onboarding questionnaire for clients.
Knowing more about who your clients are, their needs, their target customers, and the brand image that they like to establish (among other things) is crucial to building a website.
You need to gather enough information so your developed web design accurately reflects who your client is. Conducting interviews for this step, though, can consume too much time and resources. What you can do instead is to prepare an onboarding questionnaire.
This document effectively shortens and streamlines the information-collecting stage. Your client can fill out the document and submit it online. Without this form, it will take you several minutes, even hours, to conduct the interview.
You can include questions about your client profile like their ethos, brand, industry niche, products and services, target audience, competitors, value proposition, voice, and more.
Some of the most crucial questions you can ask in your onboarding document to help you create the ideal website for your clients are:
- What is the main message, purpose, or goal of the website?
- Who is the target audience? – What is the desired tone, feel, and look?
- What branding or style guidelines need to be applied?
With an onboarding document, your client can include as much information as is necessary without worrying about time constraints.
You may still need to conduct follow-up interviews for additional questions, but, for the most part, you’d have already obtained most of the information you need through the onboarding document. Follow-up interviews can now take up considerably less effort and a shorter amount of time because the onboarding questionnaire has already done the major preliminary work.
3. Define your project scope.
It’s critical at the early stages for your team and your client to agree on a project scope. Doing so will guide you on the direction and timeline of your milestones, as well as the website concept. Besides that, you will also likely encounter different types of clients with various inputs and needs.
That’s why matters about the project scope must be settled at the onset so you can proceed seamlessly and meet each other’s expectations.
These are some of the critical things that you can discuss:
- What is the budget?
- What milestones are expected?
- What is the project duration?
- What is the foreseen schedule for milestones?
- How many revisions or versions can be made?
- Should there be any site maintenance? For how long?
Define these details as much and as soon as possible to avoid any possible miscommunication later on in the engagement.
4. Generate templates.
As you keep handling design projects, you likely notice going through the same stages and tasks in your processes. You introduce the client, plan and discuss project details, brainstorm, design drafts, and more.
These stages involve documents and outputs that result from your idea exchanges to guide you in project implementation.
When you have a new project, you’ll be repeating the same tasks. Recalling the talking points and reworking your previous outputs, though, eats up much of your energy and time. To address that, you can use templates instead.
Templates encourage efficiency and consistency for often-repeated assignments. They also let you focus more on your content and reduce possible errors. For instance, you can save templates for website layouts. You can even do that on Duda by using their “Duplicate” feature.
On your dashboard, you will see a list of the sites you developed and options for desired actions for each site, including duplication, as seen below:
By duplicating or using web layout templates, you can avoid building websites from scratch — helping you save time and resources. Duda also allows you to create shared libraries of all your saved design elements, from custom widgets to portions of pages with complex layouts to whole pages to entire sites.
This negates the need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to build an eye-catching “About Us” page, for example. But the possibilities for streamlining processes here are endless.
5. Create an internal and external FAQ page.
Because you are bound to hire new talent and bring in new clients, you (or your team members) can’t avoid being asked the same questions again and again by your new clients or teammates. That can be time-consuming, of course, especially if the question asked requires a bit of an explanation.
What’s worse, while some of these questions might be repetitive, if left unanswered, your teams might not be able to continue their work until they get a reply. This can lead to bottlenecks, delays, or even conflict — something that would have been easily avoided if you were able to answer the question.
And that’s why you need to create an FAQ page for both your team and your clients’ teams. For example, newly hired web designers can refer to the internal FAQ page to learn about the leave approval process, schedule for receiving their salary and incentives, and others.
Interested and potential clients can find project-related concerns in the external FAQ section. You can answer queries like:
- Is there a refund?
- What’s the standard turnaround time?
- How much do you charge?
Your Turn
Streamlining your web design agency’s procedures not only helps you avoid needless costs but it can also improve your productivity.
It allows you to focus on the more important matters of your business and helps ensure that your websites are turned over well within the deadline. Another hard-to-ignore benefit of streamlining your process is it gives your clients a pleasant experience when working with you. This can easily lead to them referring more people your way or straight up awarding you with more projects.
If you haven’t used any of the strategies shared above, it isn’t too late for you. Start implementing the tips now so you can see improvements in how your web design agency operates.