Site-Building for a Client With Little Experience
February 16, 2011This is something that has come up for me recently, most notably with friends and family. They often say, “can you just make me a site?” I’ve run the gamut with responses, from the sarcastic, “sure, can you just build me a house?” to the more helpful, “what are you looking for in a site?” Sometimes, the first actually improves our relationship in the long run compared to the second. Many people do not really think about what goes into a site. Not that I really blame them, building a website is a foreign concept to most.
What’s interesting, though, are people’s reactions when you start asking what they want in a site and what they want it to do. I’ve found I usually get one of three reactions:
The “I’ve Never Thought About…”
This is typically the most common. People think they have a great idea for a site, or they know they need a site or an update to their site, but they don’t actually know what they want. While this can be frustrating for a developer who is looking for problems that need solving versus creating a new problem they then need to solve, it can also lead to a very collaborative relationship between developer and client. In this scenario, ideas can go back and forth, discussed and bought into.
The “Here’s Exactly What I Want, Let’s Do It Now”
These can be both good and bad. People think that just because decisions have been made about how something should work or what it should look like that that’s the hard part. In truth, the idea is generally the easy part – the implementation is hard. Take flying cars: the idea is great, true, but it’s an easy one to come up with and no one’s been able to implement it well. Yet…
Often, you will find people in this boat can have unreasonable timetable expectations or it will be a case where they don’t know what they don’t know and have unreasonable requirement expectations. On the other hand, if they have reasonable expectations, and they know what they want built, then you’re generally in the clear.
The “I Just Want a Site That Works”
Personally, I find these the hardest to deal with. The best way I’ve found to handle this is by means of analogy: “I just want you to build me a house, I’m not going to tell you the number of bedrooms I need, my price range, the town I’m looking for, the building materials…” Generally, the house example works well because everyone knows there’s a wide variety of houses and that a house is an extremely general term. If they still continue down the route of just needing a site, then I don’t really think that they’re worth the time. After I build them a site, then they’re going to have requirements and we’re just going to be back at square one.
In many other fields, requirements gathering can be glossed over or forgotten; however, as my friend and coworker Jamie Forrest wrote for our Bootstrap Blog, to do something right the first time, you need to gather requirements right the first time.
