What is included in a website consultation?

Even with the best will in the world, website building is rarely plain sailing. 

From the initial design stages through to the eventual launch, there are any number of opportunities for a challenge or two to arise. Code can break, the project brief often changes, and Google loves nothing more than to introduce a new search result algorithm halfway through the development of your new SEO plan. 

Having been involved in the build of more than 300 sites, there aren’t many website-related challenges that we haven’t faced before…

Our website consultation service is designed to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your online presence. The strengths and weaknesses predominantly focus on your internal resources, whilst the opportunities and threats often involve in-depth competitor analysis and market research. This SWOT analysis is used to help you get a contextual understanding of how your website is currently performing, as well as showcasing the potential that your website could have. 

What’s the purpose of a website consultation?

It’s a tale as old as time to have a website that isn’t performing as well as it should, especially when it comes to  sales and lead generation. 

“Build it and they will come” is sadly not something that is too applicable to web design. 

Our website consultations are designed to provide website owners with actionable strategy suggestions that will help to improve your website. This strategy is often broken down into:

• Easy wins that you could achieve quickly

• Regular actions that will yield results

• Longer-term ambitions to aim towards

More specifically, we can provide consultations focusing upon:

• General, high-level overviews

• Front end UI design

• User Experience

• Responsive web design

• Implementation of design

• Accessibility

• Analytics

• SEO

What does a consultation include?

Successful web design consulting relies upon your consultants having a holistic understanding of your business as a whole, not just your online presence. We will begin the consultation by taking the time to learn about your business, with a particular focus upon how you find and engage with your customers. 

From there, we’ll ask about your objectives and what you are trying to achieve with your website. Sometimes this can be as general as “we need more customers”, whereas other times these requests can be incredibly specific about a particular issue you might be facing. 

Once we understand these, we’ll begin our analysis of your current standing in the form of a SWOT analysis.

Strengths:

What your website is currently doing well, and how you can make the most of these strengths

Weaknesses:

Key areas that need improving, with indications of how important these weaknesses are. Sometimes they are minor and require little attention, in other cases they could prove terminal if not immediately attended to.

Opportunities: 

Through a combination of competitor analysis, market research and an understanding of your current online assets, we provide a list of opportunities relating to your website, alongside forecasts as to how beneficial and feasible these opportunities are.

Threats:

The level of threat can vary significantly. Our analysis will help you to prioritise which threats need dealing with immediately, which should be prioritising over the long term and whether you can afford to ignore some of the others. 

The Action Plan 

Quite possibly the most important part of the website consultation, we’ll provide you and your team with the steps you need to take to achieve your goals.

This action plan will be tailored around your aptitude and attitude towards web design. Not everyone wants to spend their time making changes to their site, whilst others love nothing more than “getting under the bonnet” of their website.

By understanding the resources and budgets you have available, our web consultants will create an action plan that is feasible to implement whilst still achieving your goals. We provide honest evaluations of whether your goals are achievable, as well as making suggestions of other objectives you should be prioritising.

Implementing the suggestions

At Made Simple Media, we offer our web consultancy with no obligation to use our web design services. 

That being said, we do provide a full-stack of web design solutions. Separate to the consultation, we can provide competitive quotes for the implementation of the suggestions made within the action plan. Or, should you decide you want to start afresh with a new website, we are here to help every step of the way.

To see whether we're the right website consultants for you, book in a discovery call with our friendly team.

Book a discovery call

Join the discussion

Want to have your say on this topic? Start by posting your comment below...