Monday, July 13, 2015

Outsourcers Info: What are web designers expectations from you

To build a great website, you need a great designer and more importantly a great working relationship with your designer.

We as web designers, based on our experience have created a list of KEY POINTS that needs to kept in mind while outsourcing to leverage the best benefits. Part of being a professional is to work efficiently and meet your deadline. To effectively execute a project and deliver the best benefits to you, we(as designers) lay down a few basic process and rules to enable us to communicate and understand each other better and work constructively towards the common goal. I hope you will find this useful.

1. Communication: While working remotely regular and timely communication is essential for the progress of the project. We will be happy to answer any queries/clarify and item at the earliest. Similarly, we expect Prompt responses will be provided for queries/clarifications required during development. Ideally responses by next business day are desirable. Please also note, at times you would need to allocate your time to review the work products(designs, initial sites) sent by us, so please keep that in plan. As you can understand designers can not be held responsible for delay in project timelines due to initial delay in response to queries or approval of work items from business-end.


2. Clarity: We believe in clarity in communication. In case you need to tell us something, that you didn’t like or need modified/changed, you need to let us know upfront. If you keep that to yourself and let us know after the end of the project, we may not be in a position to handle that then.  In remote communication be very clear about what you want to say and provide an example, so that its easy for us to understand what you are looking for. While discussing UI, its often helpful to add a screenshot of what you need or what is the issue you are facing.

3. Delays and Changes: Wrong requirements, incomplete or undisclosed/half disclosed requirements or requirements coming in late are major cause of project delays and cost overruns. While we understand the importance of those requirements to clients business but all stakeholders also need to realize that those new requirements coming late would cause the development team to redo/rewrite certain sections of the application to meet the needs and hence more effort will need to be expended and more time consumed. Change of requirements after development has started(apart from minor modifications) will require a change in the development cost of the software/product.

4. UI Design approval: For all projects requiring Web design, please note the purpose of the design phase to capture the whole UI look and feel (including layout, colors, typography etc) that will drive development in the next phase. Users are requested to thoroughly review all designs and communicate with us to have any corrections done before approval. Please note once design is finalized its converted to HTML/CSS and put into development. Any future change to the design will need us to redo the HTML/CSS slicing and is a rework and will be charged extra, So please make sure to review the design and let us know if there is any other changes. Similarly at any stage an approval on any artifact/docs/designs would imply that the work has been reviewed and is satisfactory. An approved work in most cases form the basis for the next stage and cannot be changed (apart from minor corrections) at a later date without cost and time implications.

5. Stock Photos, Fonts and related: For projects involving web design/graphic design, prices for purchasing low cost stock images are included. We use purchased stock images from various site for graphical design and elements. For most designs we use royalty free web safe fonts for the design. If there is any need for high cost/premium/high resolution images, fonts or any other such items, that would need to be purchased separately or charged extra.



In case there are any queries or any of the points need further clarification, please get in touch with us