Webpage Planning Questionnaire
So, you decided you want a webpage for your business or hobby. Congratulations! These days you have to have an online presence to be seen. This questionnaire’s aim is to prepare you for your interview with a web designer. It is to give you time to think about the things that will be discussed and that you are ready with your answers and questions.
Things to consider:
1. Domain name.
a Domain name is the address of your webpage on the internet. It looks like this. https://www.yourdomain.co.za
The ‘yourdomain’ portion is what we are interested in. This is something you decide on in the beginning, as if implemented, it is very difficult and ‘not wise’ to change. Your name is building a ‘name’ for itself with Google search and age plays an important role. It tells Google how often you work on your site, is it ‘live’ or ‘dormant’, are you committed to your page, and would it be wise to show your page to their customers.
Your domain name should also say something about your page, give an indication of what it is about. So think carefully about what your need is. Have a list for the designer to check for availability. Many names are taken already. Your designer will give you ways to get around names that are already taken. Just give him a list of what to start with.
You can jot down a few names here:
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If you have an established name already, what is it?
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Will you be renewing the name yearly? ………………….
Or do you want the renewal included in your package with SinglePage web Studio ………………
2. Hosting.
Hosting refer to the actual space you take online to store your website and show it to someone who asks for it by typing in your address. This is typically done by a web hosting service provider. SinglePage does not offer to host directly but offers a very efficient and fast webserver service from its hosting company. That brings us to another very important aspect of hosting and that is SPEED. That means, how long does someone wait for your site to be shown. There are two aspects to this again. First is how long does it take the server to get to the request to show the page and secondly how fast does it serve the page once it gets to the request. Most servers are ‘shared’ by a few companies and the request to show the page goes into a queue. Only when it is your turn, your page gets served. We call that ‘time to first byte’ and the second portion is called ‘total load time’. To the uninitiated, these times sound very fast, but the experienced person is not fooled by that and knows, that if someone asks for a page and wait a few seconds, he abandons the request and go to the next site. And this you do not want. You invested too much to lose a visit due to it taking too long to see your page.
So here your choice is, get your own hosting company, or use the SinglePage offer of doing it for you. Pricing will be shown in the quotation. Keep in mind that if you use your own hosting company, you will have to give us access to your host to work on your site. You also have the option to terminate your contract with your current host and transfer the domain to our host. We currently use https://www.domains.co.za/as our hosting company. Feel free to visit them and play around with the domain name function.
Your inclination:
I will use my own hosting service provider ………………………….
I will appoint SinglePage to do the hosting on my behalf. …………………….
3. Goal.
Think of why you want a website and what do you want to achieve with it?
Is it for a business? Name: ……………………………………………………
Industry: …………………………….
For a hobby: What is it? Give some detail.
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Something else?
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What do you aim to achieve?
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4. Look and feel.
What do you expect? Let me explain. You get basically the following ‘type’ of websites.
Standard:
A Home page and a few extra pages like About Us, contact us, Services page, 404 Page, Header/Footer, and so on.
Blog:
This is just a site where you do articles and people visit to read them and is able to make comments. Very similar to the Standard, only that it also includes all the designs needed for maintaining a blog.
“Standard” pages + Single post page + Archive page
Standard + Blog
Online store.
Do you want to sell things from your website, take online payments, and then courier to your clients? An online store could be very complicated and can be out of the scope of what we do, accept if it is not very involved and only a few items offered for sale.
Use the following space to jot down your ideas regarding this.
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5. Can you give examples of sites that you have seen that is more or less what you like and want? Give website addresses.
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6. Is there any specific features that your website should have?
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7. Do you have a preferred color scheme and/or fonts that you would like? If you have ideas on this, jot them down here: You will have the opportunity, later on, to alter and commit at the end of the process before we start building.
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8. Do you have an official branding kit?
Logo: Do you have one? …………………………………..
Do you want us to design one? ……………………………
Or will you get one professionally designed? ……………………………………
Branding kit? (yes/no) ………………………………………..
9. Images:
Images are another very important aspect of a website. It is so important, that it could make or break the looks of the site. Depending on how important this is to you, we would advise making use of a professional photographer’s services. You are responsible for the images.
Yes, I already have images ……………………………..
No, I will get a professional to do them ………………………………….
Please quote on your best effort to do images ……………………………………
10. Content:
Here you have a lot of work. You must supply the text and content that you will be using on your website. We cannot tell you what to show and say. We can assist, but ultimately, you will have to supply the content. Keep in mind that it is very important for search engines to find plenty and good content in the form of text, to give you a good ranking on your page. Ranking refers to how high up on the search results, your page appears, on the first page or on subsequent pages.
You do not have to give it now, but you have to start thinking in terms of this, to be ready when asked for it.
11. Social media.
If you want to link your website to your social media accounts, you have to give us the code and addresses to reach them. Not now, you can do it later. But start thinking about it and research what you are going to give us. If you do not have social media accounts yet, now is the time to get them into place. Things that come to mind, are Facebook, Google business, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest, WhatsApp group, Telegram group, YouTube Channel, etcetera. You only use social media that you are comfortable with.
12. E-mail.
The site comes with the capability to give you email addresses in the form of xxxxx@yourdomain.co.za
Will you be interested in this, or will you use your current email addresses for the site?
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What comes next?
Once you have gone through this, jotted down your ideas, and applied your mind to what you want, you indicate this to us by emailing the completed form back to us. It is just a way of indicating and let us know you are ready. We will contact you with a view on setting up an appointment just so that we can meet personally and talk this through/answer questions.
We need the following info about yourself.
Email Address: ………………………………………..
Name & Surname: ………………………………………………………………
Contact Number: …………………………………….
After the interview, we start working on a proposal with wireframes/mock-ups on what we suggest, for you to give input on and ultimately approve.
We also include a quotation with our terms and schedule on a timeframe on how long we think it will take to build the site and handover.
Finally, when all that is approved, we send you a contract of understanding for you to legally sign. When we receive that back, you do your initial payment as per the accepted quotation. Once we received payment, we begin to work on your site.
Please feel free to contact us
Should you have any questions, need clarifications, or would just like to discuss the ideas, please feel free to contact us directly:
Tom Kriek +27 82 787 1482
tomkriek63@gmail.com
My digital business card:
https://www.singlepage.co.za/card/
Who We Are?
Tom Kriek is a freelance web designer that worked on his own sites for the past 20 years and trade as SinglePage Web Studios
Please click here to have a brief look at our own web site.
https://www.singlepage.co.za/