All too often, people come to us with bespoke design baggage.

They come, lost and forlorn, with nothing to show for their struggles.

If you’ve had a bespoke design done before (before you met us at TLD), it’s possible you’ve have had a less-than-ideal experience. Perhaps you have a website now, and you don’t like it. This is terrible! It shouldn’t happen. But it does.

I can confidently say that it wouldn’t happen with us – we have a guarantee to prevent this! But here you are:

Disappointed. Unhappy. Frustrated.

What do you do? Blame the agency? Blame yourself? It’s true, some clients don’t know what they want! Or how to articulate it! And therefore, agencies don’t get the right information out and inevidebly the client is disappointed, unhappy and frustrated.

I’ve run an agency for a long time. Sometimes, we solve this by overdelivering. It’s a solution that works for our clients, but actually isn’t ideal.

To create the results we do, it comes down to us understanding what our clients want.Then we dont have to overdeliver. We agree to deliver this, the client agrees and then off we go.

The 5 Whys method

I’ve used the “5 whys” to prove to you, this can’t be all your fault! In the image above.

What’s the solution?

In our case, we take full responsibility. We can’t expect our clients to know all the answers. If the client is really at fault, the website just doesn’t get launched. We only launch websites when they are ready.

It’s a challenge to create a bespoke website that shows that you and your business are a good choice for your target audience. But we don’t put the blame on them. We know how to bring it out. It’s what we refer to as “Unique Greatness” – and we’re specialists in revealing this. In Phase 1 of the “TLD Journey,” we show our clients that this is going to be a special experience!

We want your input, but we need to be smart in how we extract this from them.

The special thing about your business is that attracts your favorite customers/ or clients or opportunities. Their “Unique Greatness” (I really should trademark this!)

So here’s a clue on what we always do to prevent this problem from occurring in the first place! And we’ve been doing this in a much more focused way lately.

• We provide a detailed questionnaire or survey to help you better articulate their needs and goals and give you space to really expand on this
• We ask a variety of thought-provoking questions and come at it from different angles.
• We listen – a lot! In our briefing meetings or meetings, we explore your needs and goals further — with active listening. We give time to allow for open and honest conversations.
• We come prepared with thoughtful questions to help guide the conversation and encourage the client to share their thoughts and ideas for their bespoke design
• We share case studies or portfolio examples to help the client better understand visually the user journey, and how they will experience our support process and capabilities.

As Marie Forleo says, everything is figuroutable. And now you’ve understood “how could this happen?” you know what to do to prevent it.

This is just part of the picture

Let’s not forget skills, talent, and experience. After all, creating a brand new bespoke website, even with the innate understanding of your unique greatness, still takes the ability, to create beautuful clear designs, to implement these with high-quality code, and keep in mind SEO, security, and accessibility.