The Lazy Mans Guide To Designing Your Customer’s Website

Reading time: Approximately 5 minutes

This is the third article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter. If you haven’t read the first article yet, feel free to go back and read it now before moving onto this one.

When I pitched my idea for Nick’s website we were sitting at his kitchen table.

I allowed myself to switch over into “sales person” mode so I sounded like I knew what I was doing.

In reality: I had no freakin’ idea.

I’ve never pitched a build for a website before. Every website I had created has either been for myself or for a relative. So while I’ve created quite a few websites in the past, I still felt a little bit like I was treading water, just figuring things out at I went along.

It’s interesting working with someone who’s paying for your services because the ideas that you have aren’t necessarily the same.

Nick and I originally started with the idea that I would come up with a couple of concepts that he might like to choose from.

What ended up happening was the exact opposite.

I started the project by drawing up a few designs for layouts on paper. Then I mocked these up in photoshop so I had something to work with and finally figured it’d be easy enough to actually implement the landing page.

So that’s what I did, I had a few designs ready for shooting at Nick so I just started on the first.

Now Nick at this stage hadn’t decided on business cards or other business stationery either, so he needed a logo and everything.

We talked about paint spewing from buckets and all sorts of stuff, so that was going to be part of the mock up.

While I think the first idea was pretty close to what he was originally thinking, Nick and his wife didn’t think it quite matched up with the homely feel they were trying to create with the business. There was something not quite right about it.

I understood and vowed alter the design to achieve that effect.

That night something magical happened.

Nick and his wife spent the entire night literally glued to their computer screen. They started thinking about what they originally thought it was going to look like and began drawing it in MS Word, the most familiar program to them.

It just wasn’t turning out right.

After a while they changed tact completely and went with a dramatically different colour scheme and logo and by the end of the night they had something that they were really happy with.

This is a little part of the email he sent me that night:

“hey dude,

hope you dont mind how these items look, we really like them [referring to the attached documents]. We had big discussions last night bout logos and decided against, we had a look at few other websites and did not really have logos. Give me a call and we can discuss properly. I hope this is alright [...]“

Amazing huh?

Even though he was a bit timid about offending me (we’re mates afterall) I was absolutely proud of my first customer. Nick and his wife turned what can sometimes be a pretty difficult job (getting requirements), into something that was just too easy.

Now I had something to work with.

This tactic of getting the customer to literally show you what they are imagining worked out much better than I could imagine, because no matter how many mock ups and designs I would have done, it couldn’t match something that came directly from their heads.

This is the lazy man’s way of designing a website – and it freakin’ works.

So now that I had the basic design, all I needed to do was polish it, and implement it. This process took another couple of weeks of working on it on and off and now we were in each other’s heads, Nick and I exchanged ideas a lot more freely.

I gave him some pointers on his business cards and other stationery and now everything about his business actually matches. His branding is consistent and he’s giving the same underlying message across everything.

My Challenge To You

I’m looking for a method/system that will allow me to quickly draw and demo layouts and designs to customers while I’m sitting right there at their table. It’s the tool I’m missing. If you know of something like this – please email me, or leave a comment below.

What Do You Do?

How do you design with your customers? Do you sit at the kitchen table and nut it out? Or do you design lots of mock ups for their approval?

Tell us about it.

For me – I’m definitely going to be lazier in the future.

This is the second article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter.

Photo Credit: rogerimp

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