[thelist] What would you do?

Joe Crawford jcrawford at avencom.com
Tue Apr 10 16:14:46 CDT 2001


Bart Posselt wrote:
<many snips>
> BTW, I quit filling out "project surveys" or whatever you want to
> call them a long time ago. Maybe it was just the people I was
> dealing with before we found our current contractor, but the
> questionnaires almost always had questions like how big our
> organization was, what our budget is, who the key decisionmakers
> are in our organization, etc. It was more like answering a
> marketing survey that was going to be turned around and sold.

How annoying! I assume though, that Gina's questions were more along the
lines of: how many pages to the site, how much text will you provide,
where will it be hosted, etc. In other words - project specific
questions. Not random "are you cool enough to work with us" questions.

> If you're having problems getting a client to fill out a form,
> just call them up and schedule a face-to-face or a conference call
> to hash out what they want. You'll be able to tell them about
> options they may not know about or suggest a better way of doing
> something. By the time someone writes down a description of how
> they want something to work or look like, it's solidified in
> their mind that that's how it should be.

Amen.

There is indeed nothing like a proper meeting to figure out what's
holding people back, and to nail down what people's expectations are.
Also to guage how well people understand websites to begin with. Always
assume they don't know as much as you, then get to the point where
you're talking the same language. Communications skills are key when
figuring out what someone wants.

	- Joe <http://artlung.com/>
--
Joe Crawford ||||||||||||||       mailto:jcrawford at avencom.com
||||||||||||||||||||||||             http://www.avencom.com
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||      Avencom: Set Your Sites Higher




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