There are a few upfront items that any potential client should have in hand when considering their project for submission to any designer or agency.

1. What is the scope? Consider the boundaries of what you want to accomplish or if it is a longer project that needs to be phased. Most people have heard of “scope creep” and no this is not a weird guy outside your office with a bottle of mouthwash. This is what happens when this item is not clearly defined and signed off on.
2. Have you prepared a project brief? This is different from a design brief but can include necessary design requests if they impact the project. This includes overall goals, current problems that need solving, budget considerations, timeline considerations, platform dependencies, etc.
3. What are the certainties? There are always things that have a barbed wire fence around them. What are they?
4. What are the variables? These are things that a client thinks they might want, has heard something about, or is just a wild idea – but they are nice to know.
5. Access to files and servers secured? Make sure that once the project is a go that you are able to get everything we need to start. After all, you and your team want to get to the fun stuff – not figure out who threw your site together back in the 90′s and what slip of paper he wrote the login credentials on.
6. Are you using analytics on the current site? If you have a site already pull the last 6-12 months of reports and have them ready. This will help see what your visitors are doing with your current site and a bit more about them. Again, not needed to get a proposal out but start getting it together.

Many of these might be obvious, but there are many times that people really want to get a project going that it’s the simple and obvious things that get overlooked in the excitement of doing something pretty.

Sometimes there is no way to have even this simple info before a project which is not great but not impossible to overcome.  I’ve actually spent afternoons in cafe’s sipping espresso drinks with a client while we work this out – it seems daunting, but if you break it down into steps it becomes more manageable.

It’s the boring, tedious preparation at the beginning that can make a smooth and successful project that is cost effective.