Selecting the right solution for your customer

When a customer approaches me and asks for say a website or an application to resolve an issue, there are a few things that I take into consideration when deciding what approach to take.

I guess the most obvious consideration is the purpose; what is the customer trying to achieve and what is the outcome that they actually need? Do they really need a full blown ERP system with every module under the sun to manage an inventory of 10 products?

The next consideration is budget - theres no point in offering to build a mansion when your customer can only afford a caravan. Even if they can scrape together the cost of the initial build, can they afford the maintenance of the mansion going forward?

Another major consideration is the tech saviness of the customer. My customers are amazingly smart people but they are not web developers or application support people. They have the ability to learn and use basic software applications, but they don't have the time or expertise to worry about hosting and security and patches and updates etc etc..they want easy simple solutions that will assist them in the running of their own businesses.

My latest client - Tracey Mitchell (www.traceymitchell.co.uk), is a professional singer and wanted a website to be able to showcase her music, allow people to see her upcoming bookings and provide an easy way for potential customers to contact her. Tracey's budget was minimal and although she is very IT literate, she wanted a simple easy content management system that would allow her to update her content on a regular basis.

Taking all this into consideration, I ruled out custom development and applications such as wordpress and decided to go with Wix as a platform. If you had of said to me a few years ago I would be promoting Wix I would have laughed however I am happy these days to sing its praises.

The Wix solution is extremely cost effective, you don't need to worry about hosting and the CMS is fantastic - you can literally create any design using it. As long as your are familiar with MS Office then you can easily work it out. As with most online solutions today there are plugin apps which allow you to add the ability to upload and see music tracks, add booking engines, add newsletters - there are literally hundreds to choose from and unlike other systems, the apps are easy to install and set up and all appear to play nicely with each other!

The website looks professional and can be built with seperate desktop and mobile views.

From an SEO perspective, the SEO is easy to manage and Wix provide a realtime report advising you if you are missing anything on your website such as image tags or if you should increase content etc.

Now that the website has been set up, it's really easy and fast for Tracey to update going forward.

For the cost, I am really impressed and my customer appears to be very happy too.

I guess I'll never get rich as a salesman offering enterprise systems but I do feel confident that I can keep it simple and find the right online solution at the right cost to solve a customers issue whilst allowing them to focus on the running of their own business..