My daughter starts school in September. She’s SO excited. She’s desperate to go and be a big girl. September can’t come soon enough for her.
It’s very exciting!
As parents, it’s all about the preparation – filling in forms, buying uniform, paying for milk, attending information evenings, thinking about after school activities, rearranging our work patterns. For our daughter, it’s all about just doing it. Diving in feet first to get right into the experience of being at school.
In your business, are you like a parent – preparing, organising, behind the scenes sorting, or are you like a child just diving in straight away?
I’m definitely a parent. I’m all about planning. I write and plan and schedule and decide things. Although I will occasionally just dive into things too, but there’s still usually at least a page of planning first with more later.
If you’re like a child and you’re jumping in with no thinking first then I’m sure that must work for some people. I just can’t get my head around how that would work for me! I’d love you to comment below and let me know how winging it works for you!
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For me, being like a parent is great, because I need to ask a lot of questions and do a lot of preparation before I start a project. I couldn’t do a really thorough job for my clients that really gets results if I didn’t do lots of preparation first. It’s the same with when I’m working on my business, I write, I scribble, I make lists, I have a plan and an idea for each thing I’m going to do before I do it.
When I’m speaking to a client about something like their new website I have loads of questions which I ask them because I want to make sure that they get the best value for their money, a website which will work and won’t need re-doing because it’s not effective enough, a website which is targeted at the right people and sending out the right message. Please, please don’t be like a child when you’re working on your website. You need to prepare. (tweet this!) Some of the questions which I ask are:
1. Why do you want a website? What’s the purpose?
2. What’s the first thing you want people to do when they get to your website?
3. Who is your website aimed at, who do you want to have visit your website? Who are your customers?
4. What do you want to include on your website?
5. Which pages do you need? Try to hone these down so there’s less rather than more.
6. What do you need to do to prepare for your new website?
– Copywriter
– Imagery – photography/ illustration
– Logo collection
– Testimonial collection
This is a good point to sketch out how you see your website working. The different routes that people take to get to where you want them to go, how you see them using your website, where you want them to DO something and how you’re going to make this clear.
I hope that’s been really helpful and if you’re thinking about having a website designed or re-jigging the one you’ve got, then I hope that’s given you some pointers that you can work with.
You can download my Design Success Toolkit to get the website checklist and a whole load of other useful design tips, checklists and help by clicking on the box below.
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This week I’d love to know if you’re a planner – a parent – or a child – just diving in, and it would be great if you’d leave your website url below and let me know what the first thing you want someone to do when they visit your website is.