Service Your Web Design Customers

Step Five: Change Cutlery

Part of the job of a waiter is to know what cutlery to serve for what meals. If a customer has ordered soup, she'll need a soup spoon. If he orders fish, he'll need a fish knife. The waiter needs to make sure that the customer has the equipment necessary to eat their meal.

A good web development house should be able to advise their clients of the hardware and software they will need to be able to run and use their site effectively. There's no point building a killer site that the clients can't see because they haven't the browsers that support it. Or one that can't handle the traffic it's getting because nobody told the clients they'd need a scaleable system architecture.
Tell the clients what they'll need for their site and, if possible, get it for them.

Step Six: Hand Over to the Chefs

In most restaurants the person who serves the food is not the same person that cooks it. The waiter has a particular people-friendly set of skills and the chef a particular knowledge of foods and how to prepare them to enhance their flavour. Once the waiter has taken the order, she hands over to the chef to make the customers the meals they've requested.

So it is with web sites. It is a good idea to leave the development to the techies and the people-pleasing to the producers, project managers, sales managers or business analysts. This isn't always possible if you're running a one-person show, but if you are, you should be able to separate the client interaction from the technical development. Just as the chef prefers to be in the kitchen to cook the meal, so do the developers prefer to be away from the clients in order to get their job done.

Step Seven: Keep the Customers Informed

If for some reason the chef is delayed in preparing the customers' meals, it's up to the waiter to let the customers know as soon as possible, and to make sure they are otherwise satisfied. If the chef is overwhelmed with orders and meals are taking longer to come out of the kitchen than usual, the waiter should let her table know that there has been a short delay. She should apologise and offer her customers something else to keep them happy - more bread, more water, another glass of wine?

Same for the web production house. It's important to keep the clients informed of any delays. Ideally, they should know of any problems as soon as possible, so that they can decide what course of action to take.

Step Eight: Serve the Meal

When the meal is prepared, it's the job of the waiter to present it to her customers. In fine dining restaurants, the meat portion of a main meal should be placed closest to customer. Slices of cake should be served with their pointed end facing inward. Presentation is all important. No matter how good the meal tastes, no one will want to eat it if it looks terrible.

When you deliver your web site to your clients, make sure the presentation is up to scratch. Check spelling, navigation and design consistency. Physically present the site to your clients, and show them how it works. Don't just leave it with them to figure out for themselves.