How to Work Effectively With Your Web Designer

A website redesign for your property is a collaborative process, even if most designers don’t need you staring over their shoulder every minute. Your involvement helps ensure that the finished product is one you’re happy with and one that drives bookings. While you may not be an expert in web design, you are an expert in your property and your goals for it. Without your input, your designer can miss the mark (they’re not mind readers!).

Here are some tips for working effectively with your designer so that you end up with a website you and your customers love.

Prepare, research, and know what you want before you cut any checks. Start with your target audience. Who are your guests, and why do they stay with you? You can find this information in your property management system (PMS) and/or customer relationship management system (CRM). Take a peek at your reviews too. You may discover something guests enjoy about your property that you didn’t know was an asset.

Your audience influences your SEO target keywords as well as the next phase of your research, your brand voice and unique selling proposition. What kind of property are you? Are you urban stylin’ or beach chic? Your brand voice needs to stay consistent across all online channels and be reflected in your web design. Your website content should not be wildly different from your social media content, or guests wonder if they’re in the right place.

Go through your current website and evaluate its metrics to see what’s working and what’s not. Is there a page that’s performing better (or worse) than expected? Flag that page for your designer’s attention. However, your website isn’t the only one you should look at. Browse your competitors’ websites for inspiration.

Knowing what you want enables you to pick the right person for the job. It’s not only about ensuring that your designer complies with professional standards. You should also check that their experience and portfolio aligns with your industry and goals. Choose a design team that specializes in creating sites for hospitality businesses like yours.

Pay attention to how they communicate. If it takes a twenty-email chain to answer a simple question, or worse, they don’t answer at all, you don’t want to work with them. They should be able to enumerate the process and let you know how often you’ll be able to review the design during development.

Go through your contract carefully. Do they own your website, or do you? This is a big one. Beware of design contracts that are tied to the use of other services such as your PMS or online booking engine. If you own your website, you can change providers and still keep your site. Any reputable designer will be happy to clarify the jargon for you. It’s especially important that you’re clear on the costs (87 percent of web designers say clients often underestimate those!).

Make sure that it’s possible for you to perform simple maintenance and updates to your website on your own. If you have to contact your designer every time you need to fix a typo, that gets expensive quickly.

Don’t be the person who necessitates that twenty-email chain. Answer the question that was asked (not the question that was already asked and answered two emails before).

If you communicate promptly and well, you stand out in a good way. A whopping 83.5 percent of website developers have a hard time collecting their clients’ information. Keep on top of your deliverables to save everyone headaches and avoid project delays. Your designer cannot do the work without the content, including logos, photos, written copy, and videos. If you’ve done your research, you’ll have a better idea of the steps needed to achieve your goals and which of those steps you have to take care of yourself.

However, it’s not enough to give your designer information. Make sure the content you pass along is current. Wrong or outdated information sets you back even further and can lead to an overflow of billable hours if your designer does work based on incorrect information, then has to go back and fix it.

Assign a dedicated point of contact for your web designer and let them know when you would like your site to go live. If things get hectic for you or something unexpected happens (say if it’s the height of your busy season or your property gets hit by flood damage), keep your designer posted and re-adjust the timeline.

Be specific with your feedback. Instead of saying “this doesn’t work for me,” try to articulate why. Even if you don’t know the jargon or design terms, you do know your property and vision for it. Feedback can be positive as well. This is worth more than an ego boost. It tells the designer what NOT to change and steers them in the right direction.

If you decide to get outside opinions (and you should), don’t ask the whole world what they think of your site. Keep it to a few people at most who know the context of what you’re trying to accomplish.

When sending this feedback to your designer, give it all at once or in batches rather than sending email after email. Your most important concerns go at the top of the list.

Lastly, listen to what your designer tells you. You hired them for their expertise, so trust it or at least give it some thought. There’s a reason they’re trying to steer you away from purple font on a red background even if those are your brand colors.

If you’re the one writing your web content and delivering it to your designer, take the time to ensure that it represents your property well. Don’t just recycle the content from your old website without making updates. What new services and amenities do you have since your previous site went live? A content revision is more than changing a couple of commas, though you should do that as well (see below).

When using generative AI to write website copy, a human should look through and edit that content, not only for any inaccuracies but to perfect your brand voice. Remember that the emphasis is on your unique selling proposition, and unique is not AI’s strong suit. Be aware that Google also detects and labels AI content in search results.

Be sure to proofread. A missing Oxford comma won’t necessarily catch your viewer’s eye, but a missing period might, and a capital letter in the middle of a sentence Definitely will. Spell check won’t always save you.

Once your website is completed, go through and take it for a test drive. Do the links make sense? Is the booking process quick and easy? Catch any issues before it goes live.

Review your site on both desktop and mobile as it may appear differently on each device. As of 2023, 58.67 percent of website traffic came from mobile devices (not including tablets), and Google uses mobile-first indexing to rank sites in search results. It’s so important to make sure your website looks great and functions well on mobile devices.