I always have one question in mind when I first start talking to a new client. However, every now and then the topic slips my mind. Sometimes the client is so interesting that I get caught up in their story and never get back to the most important question. Sometimes the list of things they want is very specific and detailed and is a thousand miles away from the big picture question that I always find the most important.
Usually, I always intend to circle back to the question, offer it up somehow and then answer it if I can, just at the right point in the conversation. That’s usually where I make a mistake. I’m looking for the right place and time in the conversation to make sure that my new client will ask me the most important question that I can answer for them. I should just jump into it first thing every time. I don’t miss it very often, maybe 1 out of every 15 new clients might not get this answered when they first talk to me. That might be considered good or it might be bad, I’d prefer to answer it for 15 out of 15 every single time.
What’s the most important Question you should always ask a new Web Developer?
Simple – How can you save me money?
There’s lots of follow up questions that can ensue, but more often than not most new clients that I speak with have 1 or more elements of their current website that are not current. If they simply changed these things out, they could often literally start saving real money by
- decreasing their monthly costs in hosting
- decreasing their bandwidth
- reducing their hosting service calls, and time wastedtalking to hosting tech support
- decreasing their ppc spend or budget and replacing the results with more effective PPC campaigns or with Organic results
- increasing conversion
- increasing search rankings
- boosting site speed to help accomplish much of the above
But you know what? That first bullet point is often the easiest fix and it is usually the one that is overlooked the most. People get on a host and the costs slowly creeps up while the service or the perceived service slowly declines as the host gets bigger and less capable of providing unique and custom experiences for you!
Over the years, I’ve had to move away from several hosting companies that ‘were’ good and over time no longer worked for me or became
too expensive. I’ve moved away from iPower, POW Web, Inmotion Hosting, Godaddy, and partially away from HostGator and Rackspace. Each move has improved the performance of my site and typically decreased my real monthly expenses. So do consider this yourself and ask me to reality check your hosting bill and whether or not you could do better elsewhere.