When working together with customers, I’d like to take an iterative (agile) approach. We start with some basis information (type of websites, style preference, …) and take it from there.
Below you find some tips to take into account during this process.

Preparation

What Kind Of Website is it?

• Informational
• Selling Products
• Selling Services

What’s the goal of your website

• Selling
• Convincing people (e.g. a political party)
• For informing people (e.g. to keep stakeholders of a project up to date)
• As a online ‘reference card’ of yourself

What’s your ideal customer. Make an avatar for him/her:

• demographics: age, country, language
• behavior:  digital native, ..
• interests: sports, diet, trends, fashion …

Content

Make sure you write the content for your ideal customer. So you might adapt your natural language.

Style

Look at website that you like.

I often use DIVI (WordPress Theme) and they have a beautiful/universal set of Template/Layouts. I often show this to people so they can easily communicate their style preference.
The link to the templates is kinda hidden, but here is the direct link.

Show & Get feedback Early On

If if the website is not yet finished, show it to people. So you can get early feedback, things you did not think about.
Also other people are less attached to your project and are seeing things you do not see (and vice versa).
There is a cost attracted if you do not do this: rework.

 

REFERENCES:

• website where you can find good photos / images, click HERE.