One of the first items of business is to survey the client’s current website and print materials. For clients that don’t have an existing website, I baseline their print and other media. I do this for a couple of reasons:

• Understand the client’s current brand message.
• Get a feel for what is and isn’t working in terms of content and functionality.
• Capture all the current content on the site, both copy and images. You don’t want to have the client come back after the new site is up and say, “Where’s that page on such and such that was on the old site? That was our only copy.”
• Note color schemes, logos, etc. in case there’s a requirement from the client to carry some of these over into the redesign.
• Assess the hosting and content management situation for site’s that already exist. I strongly recommend that clients move their site over to my recommended provider, MediaTemple.net. This allows me to work more efficiently as I’m already familiar with Media Temple’s service, servers and systems and helps keep future maintenance costs down. Trying to maintain multiple client websites on multiple hosting services each with their own interface and support is a time consuming mess.

Depending on the complexity of the exisiting site, the client’s budget and the project schedule, I will create everything from a simple email outline to a full blown report with accompanying spreadsheets, architecture diagrams, analysis, etc. For the redesign of dotp, I’ve chosen to create a short document to baseline the existing DrawingonthePromises.com and give you an idea of a simple survey.

dotp-Survey

Screenshots of the Existing Website