When a project goes sideways; managing the developer/client relationship
Hi, I’m Jann Mirchandani from Westchester Marketing Cafe where we cater to your online marketing needs.
Today I want to talk to you a little bit about what happens when a project goes sideways. It does happen and over the years we’ve gotten calls from more than a few clients that have been in great distress because all of a sudden the web developer has just disappeared. Sometimes something happens in life and the developer can’t complete the project, you never know.
So I want to talk to you about first how to avoid problems and the best way to do that is to make sure you have a contract that clearly outlines the goals and the scope of the project timeframe, pricing, all those important details to make sure that everybody is operating from the same set of assumptions. So the other part of that is, of course, you want to make sure you understand all the terminology, you want to understand what’s included in the contract. The nature of web development is such that often there is a lot of jargon involved, there is a lot of technical terms. You want to make sure that those terms are clearly defined for you so that you have a good picture of what is being included in the project and what’s not. That’s the number one source of miscommunication in projects going sideways.
The other thing that you want to make sure that you get references. That you talk to the developer. Anybody that has been in business for a long time, any professional, should not have any problem or reservation coming up with a few names of past clients for you to contact. Talk about how did the project go, were things done in a professional way, were things completed when they said they would be completed, was communication clear and professional and done in a timely way. Those are the best ways that you can do to make sure a project runs smoothly by setting it up properly. The other thing that you want to do is make sure that you stay apprised of what is happening throughout the project, so that as the project develops, as the site gets set up in beta which is the testing site, you want to know how that is progressing, you want to be able to take a look at those things. It doesn’t mean necessarily you need to or want to micro-manage the project, but you should certainly know what is happening. You should also know who is the hosting company, who is the domain registrar, you should be able to have that information readily available with login and account access information.
These are some of the most important things that I can recommend to you to make sure that your project runs smoothly with whoever you choose to develop your website.
Best of luck on your upcoming project and if you have any questions about anything we have discussed, feel free to give us a call at 914-806-7720.