It’s one of the most exciting pings you can get: that first message from a potential new client. But what comes next?
“Start with a fit call—a top level overview of the client’s goals and challenges—to quickly see if you can do a good job for them and if they’re the right kind of client for you,” say Matt and Eleanor Hancock, owners of branding and design studio Number 75 Design. With over 20 years in the business, they offer their wisdom to help you get your client collaboration started on the right foot.
Website questions for a new client are the first step of the web design process for good reason: clear communication sets clear expectations from the start. Only then can you create an accurate web design proposal, gauge their budget, and determine if your design style will suit their tastes—not to mention identify a scope that’s bigger than a website.
Every creative professional should develop their own kick-off process to match their personality and brand. The guide below will help you create and refine your process, and includes examples of website questions to ask your new clients.
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11 website questions for clients to kick-off your project
“People generally want to be heard,” says Eleanor. “They know they have a problem.” This means listening before strategizing. “Spend time upfront before you give the client a diagnosis. Their problems and challenges aren’t always what you thought they were at the beginning.”
These questions will help you find out all of the important details at the beginning, including the client’s ambitions, their business and their branding.
01. What are your main goals?
Start your conversation here—it will ground your discussion on a shared outcome that you’ll return to as you dig for more details about your client’s business and ambitions. “Lead with the emotion, the bigger picture and what their ultimate goals are, rather than what the website should look like,” says Eleanor. Ask if the main objective is to increase brand awareness, differentiation or online sales. Ask about their mission statement and why they started their business.
Identifying clear goals also helps with your own efficiency. If you don’t initially get to the heart of your client’s needs, your projects risk going off scope, says Eleanor. Plus, goals can help you align the UX design strategy to your client’s KPIs, and then later measure if the site is a success.
02. What are your challenges or problems?
Once you know what your clients want to achieve, you need to identify what’s in the way. You might need to ask this question in a few different ways to get your clients to think more deeply. “It’s like going to a doctor to get a thorough diagnosis,” says Matt. “Pull back the layers to see what’s really happening with your client—or you can’t give the best advice.” Often, clients think their problem is one thing but you determine it’s something else—don’t be surprised if they’re surprised by your findings.
03. What does your business do?
Your design should reflect your client’s core values and personality, so ask them to describe the business in their own words. Pay particular attention to their choice of words: this can help you create a distinction between an important message for the homepage hero, and supporting messages for other sections or pages.
04. What makes your company stand out?
Now, learn what sets the client’s business apart from the competition: not only its product or service, but also intangible or emotional added value. Depending on the product, it could be the sourced materials, production methods or sustainability. If it’s a service business, messaging can emphasize expert credentials, availability or specialization.
This can be a hard exercise for the client and even something they don’t know how to answer. “They are so in the jar, they can’t see the label,” says Eleanor. “It’s our job to work out what makes their company stand out.” You’re an outside party without an emotional attachment to the business, so use that to your advantage. Don’t be afraid to pry—asking in-depth questions can help reveal the business’s real point of difference.
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05. Which competitor are you inspired by?
One mistake many web designers make is to get a list of competitors and replicate what they’re doing. This won’t help your client own their piece of the market, says Eleanor. It’s not about who the client sees as competition—it’s about who customers see as competition, and how your work will help the client grab customers’ attention.
“It’s your job to put their business in a category of one, where the competitors can’t even touch them,” says Eleanor. By identifying a key competitor that your client admires, you can create a more focused strategy or web design that helps the business stand apart and stand out.
06. Who is your ideal customer?
“If you focus on top level demographics,” says Matt, “you’ll never get that deep connection to your audience.” Instead, capture details about a client’s perspective, attitude or aspirations.
Eleanor recommends asking for a story about a favorite past customer: “what was so great about them? What did the client like? Is this a typical customer?” Use these deeper responses to create a user persona that serves as a single source of truth to guide your strategy and design development with users front of mind.
07. Which website designs do you like and why?
Before you start designing, get a sense of your client’s style and tastes. It’s not enough to have a conversation about aesthetics, says Eleanor: “what a client defines as cool and edgy might be different from my definition of cool and edgy.” Let clients express their creativity with a bit of design research, and send you a few sites they like, along with a brief explanation of what makes each one appealing. If you have a wide portfolio, share examples of designs or elements from past projects that could be relevant references for their brief.
Share these Wix Studio website examples for inspiration.
08. Are any website features an absolute must?
You’re not looking for your client to give you a running list of every function on every page, but it’s good to know if there’s anything they can’t live without. Because you already know your client’s goals, you’ll provide them with a thorough recommendation on what their site will include to meet these goals.
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09. What’s your budget?
Knowing your client’s budget is an important factor in deciding if you’re a match for their project. You’ll understand how much time—and the level of complexity—you can provide for the website design.
Alternatively, you can lead with your project fee and explain what this includes—both your processes and the deliverables. Number 75 Design recommends this approach and communicates their price range with the value that each package provides. “If you have a strategy that is very transparent and your clients can see the value, it’s not up to them to decide how much something costs,” says Matt. As an experienced professional, you can guide the conversation with examples of past projects and websites you’ve delivered to help the client visualize the impact of working with you.
Full guide: How much to charge for a website
10. When do you want to go live?
Not every project has a pressing deadline, but some website clients want to go live for a new product launch or an important event. Use this website question to assess if it’s possible to meet this date, or propose a later date that gives you time to meet their specifications—especially if you already have projects in the works and your new client will need to wait a few weeks. This wait time can be used productively, says Eleanor, for clients to do their homework and pull together information or arrange a photo shoot.
Some clients won’t have a set date in mind, so you can recommend a standard package or customized plan based on your experience, and see if it works for them.
Full guide: How to create a website project timeline
11. Do you have a style guide or existing images?
Your client might already have a digital style guide—with details on the brand’s logo, colors and typefaces—or an image bank of product and team photography. Will it meet the needs of their new goals or does it need a refresh? Depending on your project plan, branding work could require more money and more time. However, good brand guidelines are worth the investment: they can be used for years and give the client creative independence to design materials on their own (and save money on outsourcing).
4 website redesign questions for a new client
You’re likely to encounter clients who already have a website but turn to you for a new design. Alternatively, you can win clients by finding sites that need a refresh and proposing the benefits of an update, like faster performance or a responsive web design. In either case, these website redesign questions—when added to the questions above—will fill in all the information gaps.
01. Which systems does your website use?
Understanding a client’s website systems can indicate if they’re fit for purpose or require a website migration. Plus, you’ll get a sense of how tech literate they are. For example, clients who want to update parts of their website post-launch are probably best suited with a low-code, no-code website platform for its ease of use. “Clients want to write their own blog posts, maintain their shop, change their shipping—all these things to run their business,” says Matt. “Wix Studio is so intuitive, it’s easy to pass to the client and they feel confident to just fly with it.”
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02. Are you satisfied with your website’s current tech stack?
This website redesign question will help you identify if new tools or providers are needed to improve the site’s performance or management experience. Keep in mind that the tools need to work for your client’s long term needs, not only your design preferences. “Wix Studio is brilliant because we can create what clients need, hand it over to them and give them a tutorial,” says Matt. “They can manage and maintain their site without coming back to us—which is what we want for them. We’re not making something that’s impossible for them to maintain.”
Full guide: How to pitch Wix Studio to your clients
03. Is there anything you can’t do right now that you want to do?
“We ask why they’re thinking about redoing their site right now, as opposed to six months ago or in six months time,” says Matt. It helps to know what exactly is holding your client back. This answer could reveal that the current website platform limits their potential, and they need more than a visual redesign.
04. What do you like and dislike about your website’s design and experience?
As Eleanor advises, don’t get bogged down in features or creative direction from the client—this is your area of expertise. But this website redesign question is another way to gauge your client’s tastes and expectations. Are there colors they don’t like? Is information outdated? Is the user flow counterintuitive? If possible, get access to the site’s data—such as website heatmaps—and see what you can learn from looking first-hand behind the scenes.
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Why ask a client website questions before a project?
Asking a client questions before building a website can seem like a monotonous start to a creative process—but it’s necessary to build trust and demonstrate your expertise.
“Clients want to know that if they’re going to invest with you, you’re going to do a good job and look after them,” says Eleanor. “We need to show that we’re giving them the best advice, and that we’ve looked at everything before we create something that may or may not be right.”
You’ll get to the heart of your client’s challenges and needs, and solve the problem that makes the biggest impact on their business—which might be more than web design.
You’ll create an accurate project plan and fee, thereby avoiding scope creep and minimizing unanticipated additional costs.
You’ll manage expectations early about what can be achieved within the project’s budget and timeline, so clients aren’t disappointed later.
You’ll protect yourself by not taking on projects with unrealistic demands that aren’t set up to succeed.
You’ll save time and effort by gauging the seriousness and mindset of a potential client before getting started on a negotiation. “The last thing you want is to be committed to a relationship and be unable to move on with things because you’re waiting on them,” says Matt.
When and how to ask a web design client these questions?
Now that you know what to ask, here’s how to get the most value from your website questions:
Ask as a first or second point of contact. Because you cover this early in the process, you’ll filter out irrelevant opportunities and save time for your current projects or future new projects. “We have a 15 minute call for a top level overview on their challenges, their goals and what they would like to get out of a project,” says Eleanor.
Ask face-to-face or on Zoom. Choose the format that’s most convenient for you and your client. If your clients are not close enough for a face-to-face meeting, choose a video call platform you can rely on. For example, platforms that generate transcripts—Zoom and Google Meet—or that support meeting note add-ons, like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai, relieve the stress of note-taking so you can focus on the conversation and chemistry (and pull up what your client said weeks after the call).
Should I send a questionnaire? Creating a website design questionnaire on tools like Typeform gives a client freedom to come back to you on their own time and doesn’t pull you away from your work. But don’t rely entirely on forms and emails in the place of a quality interaction. “Spending at least a couple of hours together provides loads of lightbulb moments,” says Matt.
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Wrapping your mind around a new project can be daunting, so leverage these website questions for your new client to bring confidence, transparency and clarity to your collaboration. Matt agrees: “You’re caught on the hamster wheel, but take a step back and have a look at what’s really going on.”
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