When working on web development projects for clients, you will have to deal with all kinds of people. Some will know exactly what they want with their website, others won’t. Usually, this happens with direct response crowd. These are the folks that measure everything in their marketing from response percentages to conversion rates to return on investment.
Direct response companies and business owners typically have swipe files of copy and advertising that work well for them. They will tell you what they want on the website, what worked for them in the past and what didn’t, where they think they have an area for improvement and how they will be measuring success.
You will also encounter people that are absolutely clueless about what they want. In this case, after the client accepts your proposal and makes a payment, you want to create an image of the future website. The image will help you define the project and build a website that the customer wants.
Your best option with people who don’t really know what they want is to first ask questions and try to get goals and specifics out of them. Once you do that, the best way to proceed is to give them a menu that they can choose from because you can’t really expect people that don’t know what they want to describe you what it is that they want. However, when you give them a menu, they will become more confident and will start making choices by taking decisions. Does that make sense?
If your client is a business owner that wants his or her site to bring in more customers, ask them how the business is currently getting customers. Find out what image the business is projecting offline and via other media. Then, use the image to create a website for the business. This way, you will use what is already working for a company without trying to reinvent a wheel or build a sales process from scratch.