If you want your web design agency to reach nauseous growth, you need to streamline and optimize your workflow.
It is by doing so when you can double your sales (and production), which would ultimately lead to your company’s growth.
That is why you need to be mindful of your team’s productivity.
You need to be aware of the gaps in your workflow that’s negatively affecting your team’s productivity levels, so you can make the necessary adjustments to fix the gaps.
In this guide, we’re going to look into several productivity tips for your web design agency.
1. Create an onboarding document.
Instead of having to brainstorm for pertinent questions every single time you have a discovery call with a prospective client, you can send them an onboarding document so they can answer it.
The document will contain questions like:
- What kind of feeling would you like to bring out when your visitors land on your website?
- What are the three primary colors that you’d like us to use? (If any)
- Who is your target audience?
- What are their most pressing problems?
- Etc.
To create an onboarding checklist, you can use Google Forms.
Here’s one I created in as quickly as two minutes.
It’s very easy to create and customize the forms. There are even several types of fields that you can choose from.
With the help of Google Forms, you can avoid having to spend hours brainstorming about the questions that you need to ask your clients — you already have them prepared.
What’s more, your clients can give your questions some serious thought before they answer, since they’d have to write their replies.
The best part is, you only need to create the onboarding document once, and you can use it for almost every prospective client you deal with.
Depending on the number of prospective clients you deal with, you can save days worth of back and forth convo (and interviews) with your prospective clients just by sending them the same onboarding document again and again.
2. Research about your client extensively.
Extensive research about your clients, their websites, and the topics related to their industry can go a long way in making your meetings with them more productive.
When you are equipped with ample industry- and business-specific knowledge about your clients, the shorter your meetings and onboarding process becomes, and the faster your team can produce the designs that highly-resonate with your clients’ goals and brand image.
If your client already has a website, you can even study not only its company profile, but also the site’s current design, hierarchy, and layout.
You can discover and look into aspects that need correcting, such as the presence of multiple heavy images causing slow loading speed.
After all, you need to build your client’s web design for speed and other aspects impacting user experience (UX). Your findings can then shape how you will redesign your client’s site.
To help you determine your clients’ sites’ load speed, you can use a free online tool like GTMetrix.
Not only will the tool give you an idea of your site’s performance when it comes to how fast it loads, it even shares issues and suggestions on how to improve your clients’ sites’ load speed.
To show you how it works, I used moz.com as an example.
This is the result that GTMetrix brought for Moz.
And these are some of the recommendations.
With the help of free online tools like GTMetrix, you can gain a better understanding of the status of your prospective clients’ website.
3. Allow your designers to take breaks.
Accomplishing consecutive multiple and heavy designing workloads can eventually wear out your designers.
When they are over-worked (mentally or physically), they will make more mistakes, which can lead to them spending hours upon hours doing firefighting tasks.
Not just that, when they are exhausted, they’ll run out of creative juice.
Both of which can wreck your team’s productivity levels.
This is why allowing your designers to take sufficient breaks is crucial to your company’s success.
When your team is well-rested and can focus on their work, they’ll be able to produce more while making fewer mistakes.
What’s more, since they’ll be overflowing with creative juice, they’d be able to come up with exceptional UX/UI designs to help with your website’s SEO and conversion rates.
4. Employ time-tracking tools.
Tracking the time your team spent on brainstorming, researching, designing, and other tasks will help you uncover several areas of improvement in your business workflow.
It helps you compare the amount of time and effort accomplishing tasks should ideally take, and how long it actually took for your team.
For example, if you’re making a blog site for your client, you have to organize menus, customize templates, and integrate your client’s branding, among others.
If it took your team longer than usual to complete the tasks, you can probe into the reasons and find ways to help them.
As you learn more about your team’s struggles and help them overcome it, they become better at what they do, which leads to them being able to do their work faster and with a stronger level of polish in the future.
To help you monitor your team’s work duration and productivity, you can use time-tracking tools like Clockify.
Clockify lets you log your tasks, manually enter your hours, set them as billable, start the timer, and stop and pause it as needed.
It even lets you add and remove team members, view data like the number of hours and billable amount from your dashboard, and generate periodic reports, among others.
With tools like Clockify, you can measure your team’s work rate realistically and monitor your resources and time dedicated to the project so you can be more profitable in your endeavors.
What’s next?
What are some of the best productivity tips that you’ve used as a web design agency that has helped you skyrocket your productivity?
If you have tricks up your sleeve that you’d like to share with the community, please share them in the comments section below. Cheers!