How to communicate with your web designer
Do you have a go-to web designer that’s on call to make updates and additions to your website? If you do, that designer likely has several or many clients just like you that they are maintaining on a daily basis. Most of us freelancers maintain several different websites for several different clients. Sometimes (and ideally) this can make for a very busy schedule for us designers. As a client, your website is your whole world, so it makes perfect sense for you to shoot me an email requesting a quick update to your site. That is the preferred method of communication between us, and it provides a sort of history for either of us to refer to as the project moves along.
Occasionally I’ll open an email that contains a very vague description of a task, and a slew of back-and-forth emails commences. To remedy these unnecessary headaches and possible miscommunications, here’s some helpful hints for emailing your updates to your designer so it would seem they are reading your mind:
Updates and additions to your website
What page needs changing (URL link)
Copy updates
What is the sentence(s) that needs changing (example: 3rd paragraph, last sentence)
Indicate which pages (URLs) Does it appear in multiple places?
Send the correct sentence in its entirety
Send all updates in plain text, or at least so I can copy/paste
Document updates
pdf menus should be editable (copy/paste-able)
videos are compressed for web streaming
All downloadable documents should be compressed to their lowest file size
Skip the attachments if possible
Finally, if you are requesting a major update to an entire page or section, but really have only changed a handful of sentences on that page, please just copy and paste the new copy into an email rather than sending me a Word Document. I am a Mac, not a PC, and Word docs (although I can open them) always lose some aspect of formatting, highlighting or colored text that you have so painstakingly prepared for me.
I hope this helps us communicate a little better; it will certainly aid in getting your updates processed quicker and a happier designer I will be!
