/Client-Preliminary-Questions

Question to ask client before begining project. This has been created using various resources, references, and personal experience over the years.

Client-Preliminary-Questions

Question to ask client before begining project. This has been created using various resources, references, and personal experience over the years.

Business

  • What is the nature of your business?
  • What is your business elevator pitch?
  • What makes your company remarkable?
  • In your business what do you define as success?
  • In your business what do you define as failure?
  • Who are your competitors?

Previous Website

  • What can you tell us about your previous website and the overall development experience?
  • What would you like to see change in your website?
  • Are you receiving the desired results from your current site?
  • How have your customers reacted to your previous website?
  • Is your current site creating inbound leads?
  • Do you have analytics from your previous website?
  • Is there anything you would like to carry over from your old site?

Previous Website Technical Details

  • Do you already own your domain name?
  • Do you already have a hosting plan for your current site?
    • Who is it with?
    • Are you looking to change your host?
  • Do you know how much traffic your previous website was receiving?
  • Do you already have an SSL certificate?
  • Did your previous website make use of a CMS?
  • Did your previous website make use of any automated marketing software or CRM?
  • Did your previous website have Google Analytics or other analytics packages?

Customers

  • Who are your customers?
  • Do you have demographic information from your own customer research?
  • What would be your "super-customer"?
  • What pain points are you solving for your customers?

New Website

  • What do you want your new site to accomplish?
  • What are some of your favorite websites and what do you like about them?
  • Will your new website require any specific accessibility requirements beyond those outlined by the Web Accessibility Initiative?
  • Do you want your new website to incorporate a CMS?
  • Do you want your new website to incorporate any automated marketing software or CRM systems?
  • Have you already created a site architecture?

Functionality

  • Do you want to incorporate user profiles on your site?
    • Do you want to integrate social media login capabilities?
    • What do you want the user profile to track?
  • Will your site incorporate media objects such as audio or video?
  • Would you like your customers to post reviews?
  • Do you want to incorporate a blog into your website?
    • Do you want users to be able to leave comments on individual blog entries?
  • Do you want to integrate a live chat system for talking to customers in real time?
  • Do you want search capabilities for your website?
  • Will you need multiple language support for your website?
  • Do you want to incorporate social media sharing capabilities for your site?
  • Will you be accepting online order processing?
    • Do you have an ecommerce platform already selected?
  • Do you have multiple sites that need to be managed through a single CMS?
  • Will your site incorporate running third-party ads?
  • Would you like to budget for user testing during the design and development process?
  • Do you plan on publishing and event calendar on your site?
  • Do you need Google Analytics or other analytics services added to your new site?
  • Are there other tools (such as Office 365) that you would like integrated into your domain?
  • Do you have any must have features not addressed here?
    • Email collection?
    • Auto-responders?
    • Photo galleries?
    • Slider banners?
    • Quote requests?
    • Quick Contact forms?

Content

  • Do you have a current CMS or would you like our recommendation on a CMS?
  • Do you have a content strategy?
  • What types of content will be published to the site?
  • Does your current site have duplicate content?
  • Will you be reusing or repurposing content from your current website?
  • Who will be providing copy for the website?
  • Who will be providing visual assets for your website?
    • Photography?
    • Video?
    • Graphics?
  • Will you need us to properly format your assets?
  • Do you have assets, such as whitepapers, eBooks that you would like placed behind a form wall?
  • Do you have user personas and have will we need to set up conversion funnels for each persona?
  • Will you need external content sources incorporated such as RSS feeds?
  • How often will you be updating content?

Design

  • Do you have logo assets?
  • Do you have a brand style guide?
  • Do you have old marketing material to reference?
    • Brochures?
    • Posters?
    • Web banners?
  • Are there other assets you have that you want to be sure to incorporate?
  • Will any new assets need to be created for the project?
  • Do you have stock imagery you have previously silenced that you want to incorporate?
  • Do you want or will you have original imagery created for this project?
  • Is stock imagery an option to fill certain content areas?
  • Do you already have any accounts with stock image/media houses?

Benchmarks / SEO

  • Is your current website responsive or optimized for mobile users?
  • How much of your current website has been indexed?
  • How many inbound links are pointing towards your current website?
  • What pages receive the most traffic on your current site?
  • What pages have high rankings in search engines?
  • How many page views do you receive each month?
  • How long to users typically spend on your current site?
  • What is your bounce rate?
  • Do you have metrics for sales generated by your website per month?
  • What is the loading time of your current site?
  • Where does your traffic originate?
    • Organic?
    • Referral?
    • Social Media?
    • Email Marketing?
    • Word-of-Mouth?
    • Direct?
  • How much of your current traffic is from mobile devices?
  • How much of your current traffic is from tablets?
  • What are the sources for your mobile/tablet traffic?
  • Do you have current metrics you use to measure blog entry success?
  • What other metrics do you use to measure the success of your current website
  • Does your website incorporate landing pages for marketing campaigns?
    • Which of these pages/campaigns has been the most successful?
  • What would be a conversion metric for your site?
    • Do you need help in exploring what metrics would benefit your business?
  • What are your top performing keywords?

Lead Generation

  • Do you collect information from visitors to your site?
  • Is this information incorporated into a CRM?
  • What is information would you like to receive from a customer?
  • Do any of your current forms include progressive profiling?
  • Do you run email campaigns?
    • What type of emails do you send?
  • Does your current site have any call-to-actions on pages or blog posts?
  • Do you want automated emails to be triggered by customer actions?
  • Will you be running ads through ad networks or be using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site?
  • Do you want the ability to create, edit, and publish landing pages and other site pages?

Social Media

  • Do you currently manage social media content?
  • What is your current social media strategy?
  • Will you need us to create any social media accounts for you?
  • What are your best performing social media accounts?
  • How much site traffic do you generate from social media?

Reports

  • Will you be managing your own analytics, have a service already in place or would you like us to provide you with this service?
  • Do you prefer your analytics reports electronically or printed and presented in person?
  • How often would you like to have these reports generated and presented?

Relationship

  • Are onsite meetings required?
  • Do you have a preference for services used for virtual meetings?
  • Who will be managing the site after launch?
  • Will you require training on properly maintaining the site?
  • Who will be responsible for providing feedback and reviews for the site?
  • Who will be conducting the final project sign-off?
  • Do you have a legal and compliance team that will need to sign off on copy that is submitted or created?
  • Will you need a privacy policy statement created for the site and do you already have legal representation to provide this?
  • Would you prefer to provide feedback for wireframes, designs, and staging site through email or through collaborative project management systems?