What do Wordpress developers need to know before they kick-start the project?

It doesn’t matter if you are a fresher or an experienced person in business, your main aim should be to deliver a site that functions perfectly on time.

When you are discussing a potential Wordpress project with your client, you need to ask 5 very crucial questions whose answers will help you land the job, develop the best site possible for you client and most importantly, it will help you get paid.

So let’s start with knowing what those questions are:

Question 1: What is your site’s purpose?

Your prospective client definitely has a purpose in his mind for his site. The site with its potential can attract different types of audience and it depends on what the purpose is.

Your client must be directly asked this question, no beating around the bush. It is important to know the purpose of his site.

It may be surprising to know that many people with existing websites may not have given a thought to this question. This must be answered by different stakeholders if the organization group is large.

It is important to know the answer to this question clearly as it will not only result in customer satisfaction but also reduce the workload upon you.

Question 2: What do you want site visitors to do?

The next question that comes after knowing the purpose of the site is to know what the visitors want to do. The goals and conversions of your site come into action here.

It may happen that your client probably be looking for prospects or they may be planning to sell direct.

It is important to be clear what the visitors are willing to do and it can be known by directly asking- what do you want the site visitors to do?

For instance, the purpose of the site is to attract more leads and prospects and when it comes to what the site visitors should be doing, top 2 priorities come up: newsletter signups and lead magnet downloads. You must then be able to put simple yet potential solutions to your client.

You might talk about integrating Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms and it depends on the overall complexity of the requirements. The next question followed must be about the content if it is prepared for lead magnets.

The main reason for asking this question is you can discuss clearly on specific options instead of bringing up eventual solutions. Moreover, you can know the tracking and analysis required in order to improve conversions and goals. After this question is sorted, the next doubt arises is about the budget.

Question 3: What is your budget?

A web developer is always aware about what a client wants and how much he can afford. Negotiation becomes necessary here to find the place suitable for both you and the client.

There will be some clients who will have zero idea about their budget. They will demand for flat prices with all the options available to them you must readily figure out the prices of design, development and SEO in advance so that you can present it before the client for particular services without making you compromise with unsupportable costs.

It is important to raise this question of budget before the client so that you can know if the client you are dealing with is problematic or not. If your client looks in the overall development of project, you will face no problems dealing with such types of clients.

Question 4: Are you already familiar with Wordpress?

There are many reasons for which this question is important to ask.

1.You can have an idea of the level of expertise you should be implementing in your general conversation with the client. If the client has no idea of Wordpress, there must be someone else in the organization who must know.

2.It gives you a hint of the training costs and general hand-holding of the overall budget of the project. If the client is an amateur but is willing to have the driving seat all by himself of Wordpress, you will need to provide some training and general on boarding.

You can recommend resources like Lynda.com and WP101 to your clients but can’t simple take everything upon them. Some sort of project wrap-up is necessary.

3.If the client is convinced that he can perform your job better than you, it is probably the sign of a potentially problematic client. You may have a quick inquiry of his previous experiences to make the communication clear and issue-free.

Question 5: What Three sites are closest to your vision?

Ending up with a shared idea of the project is very difficult for people. Even if the clients try their best to explain you what they’re after, you may not be able to picture out what actually they are upto.

In order to have a grip on the client’s requirements and design tastes, ask them for links to three sites that match the best with what they are trying to achieve.

Tell them to be specific in their choice. It is better to extract more and more information.