Webmasters, coders, web designers, and other online asset providers are a unique breed. They are artists, coming up with ideas and designing visually pleasing material to attract visitors to your website, but they are also programmers, thinking in the language of computer science. This unique mixture of traits in the average web programmer, not to mention the fact that web development teams often work outside the office as contractors or freelancers, can make communication with them a challenge. But when clear communication between a business and a web development team is reached, it can bring a project to new levels. Here are some tips for making communication with your online team simpler and more effective.
Consider Writers
Developing a website is a lot like writing a piece of advertising copy, but on a larger scale in a different language. Both tasks involve completing a task and communicating with an audience in an effort to attract them to a sale or business. When putting together information to send to a coder, think of questions you would ask yourself or a contractor when writing an essay: Who is the target audience of the project? What do you want the target audience to know? How do you want to present yourself or your business to the target audience? How deep into the subject matter do you want the website to go? If a web developer understands where you are coming from with the assigned project, they can communicate in a way that makes it easier for you to know where they are coming from as well.
Don’t Pretend to Know if You Don’t
Many contracted and freelance web developers complain about clients who try to use technical vocabulary when they don’t fully understand it, as if the web developer would not understand regular language. Throwing around specific coding language names may seem helpful, since it is being specific about the task at hand, but unless you’re sure the code you are talking about is used that way, it can make things more complicated for your web team, and even make them upset with you. Cyberspace is full of blogs with disgruntled web developer rants about being asked to code the structure of a web page in a design language. A good web development team is more than happy to answer questions, so ask if you’re unsure.
Be Specific
Getting into specifics with an artist, which is half of what makes a web designer a web designer, can seem to be dampening their creativity, but the coding aspect of a web developer will thank you. Coding takes time, and few things are more frustrating for a web development team than finding out after the matter they didn’t have all the information they needed to make the best product for the client. Being as clear and detailed as possible with your team saves everyone time, money, and frustration.
Use Visual Tools
Since web design brings together the visual and language, the use of visual tools can be extremely helpful in planning and refining web content. Web designers usually provide a mock up of a website before completing all the coding, and with use of Google Docs or another document sharing program with drawing capability, you can put the changes you’d like to see right on the mock up. You can also sent your developers a simple mock up of your own. Getting the project into visual space is a huge step towards clear communication.
Professional Web Hosting
@JulianaP16 is a Sysadmin blogging for specialist web hosting company InMotion Hosting, who are known for their exemplary US based technical support for their range of shared, VPS virtual provate server, and dedicated hosting.