We have just about finished redesigning and reworking alangilchrist.com, a site for Alan who, as Northern Ireland’s Top Hypnotherapist, has now been in practice at the Belfast Hypnotherapy Centre for over 24 years and is the longest practising and most experienced Hypnotherapist in Northern Ireland, and is now practising in Spain.

The site originally developed by Alan himself was full of some excellent content, just need some restructuring. In conjunction with Alan Gilchrist we designed a suitable look and implemented that across the entire site.

You are encouraged to have a look at the site, and contact Alan if you are seriously trying to give up smoking, control your weight or fight any one of many phobias.

Despite some companies having a tried and tested approach with clients, we as web designers/developers should constantly be thinking of, and applying, new concepts in the client facing process. Personally I can appear very nervous when dealing with clients who - in many cases - simply don’t know what they want. Often, when its a redevelopment of an existing site I often feel like telling them “like it is” but always fail and almost capitulate and agree that minor changes are all that’s needed.

The other night I was flicking through Sky and stumbled over an old episode of Kitchen Nightmares, where Gordon Ramsay goes in and basically crushes a business and shows them how to rebuild it, properly and successfully, with his no-nonsense approach. This promted me to think, well if he can do that to his clients why can’t the same principal be applied to our clients when they are looking for advice on how to get their site working.

So, I watched a more episodes over the next few days to see if I could see a pattern that could be converted to some kind of model to follow, and this is what I found true in most cases:

1. Keep it simple - simplifying menus (sites) makes it easier for the kitchen (client) to manage and less choices make it easier for the customer to make a decision.
2. Feedback and communication - improve and document communication between the staff (designers/developers) and the customer (client) and end-users. Get regular feedback from visitors and customers to the restaurant (site). Act on that feedback.
3. Fresh produce of the highest available quality - restaurants need the freshes produce, and a website needs to be current and fresh as well, adding new content regularly (blogs for example).
4. Taste testing - testing whether its a new menu or a new website is essential. Beta testing high user interactive sites will pay dividends. Get real users who have little knowledge of the site, make sure that they can use it comfortably. Then test again.
5. Influencing customers - often Ramsay gets the restaurants to specialise in some way, so make sure that the web page is clear in what you want them to do next whether thats purchase, request more information or contact you etc.

One thing that really stands out is Gordon Ramsay’s passion, he really loves what he does, and if the restaurant owners can see that he is genuinely helping them then they ultimately succeed, when they see the critisicm as a dirrect slur on them and don’t accept it in the way its intended then the business, usually fails or returns to its previous level.

Tech1 are passionate about web sites and making your business succeed in the dautning world of the internet, your clients should be passionate about their website and their business, if not try to inject some passion into it, otherwise it will ultimately not reach its potential.

Good luck, and remember that sometimes a “no BS” approach works.