Choosing a web designer

Choosing a web designer is a crucial decision, as a good website can bring you more business and a bad one can drive away prospective customers.

Below are some important things to consider when selecting a website designer for your project.

What to look for in a good web designer

Many clients have difficulty choosing a web designer, simply because they aren’t sure what to look for. Here are some things to consider when choosing a professional web designer;

A strong portfolio. The sites should be memorable as well as appropriate for each project.

A strong sense of marketing. Your designer should be able to clearly articulate the goal of each site and how it reached its audience.  Designers should be able to tell you how their work translated into higher sales figures, greater attendance at clients’ events, or some other concrete result of their work. They should be able to explain the goals, the process, and the results of their work, what was asked, what the client wanted, what was the expected result and how they planned to achieve it, and how they met and fulfilled their customers needs.

Great web design is not only about looking good, it has to be useful too, No matter how attractive your website is, if visitors can’t find it, or  don’t know how to find what they want, they will go elsewhere. Your web designer needs to have a solid grasp of usability, interface, Intuition and accessibility principles in order to deliver an effective and useful website.

In the increasingly competitive World Wide Web, it’s critical for your site to be optimised for search engines, your web developer should know how to implement basic search engine optimisation techniques, should build websites compliant to W3C HTML standards, should provide you with reports about your websites performance in the search engines and should be able to tell you how it is optimised for your target keywords.

Who is a good designer and how much do they charge?

Much of your choice of designer depends on what you want, what you hope to get from your website and how you want to achieve it.  Here are some things to think and ask about before hiring a website designer:

Pay attention to how much they ask you about YOUR BUSINESS. They should want to get to know you and your business intimately. How else can they design a site that reflects you and your business, unless they spend time to get to know you?

Ask them what they know about Internet marketing and search engine optimisation. Be sure that they’re creating a site for you that meets your larger marketing and business goals. (A pretty site is no good to you unless it generates revenue and prospects.)

Ask the designer for their fees and what is the estimated cost for the site you want. They may not be able to give you a good estimate until you discuss content and features of the site.

Ask them how they bill you. Will they invoice you monthly, or when certain milestones are reached? Do you need to make a deposit up front or on satisfactory completion of the work?

Pay attention to whether they’ll try to stick within your budget, or whether they keep suggesting new add-ons that increase to the cost of your site. Remember, designers aren’t responsible for your budget — you are.

Talk to some of their current and recent clients, to see how smooth the process was. You want someone who has good project management skills AND good communication skills. They have to listen to you, not just give advice.

Ask them whether they will maintain your site after the initial design, and how much they’ll charge for that. Some designers want to create new sites but don’t want to maintain them.

Find out what types of programming language they will use in your site, some such as PHP and ASP are more mainstream and easier to maintain and update than others (use of a good program and file structure or framework, object orientated or class based programming, good planning and documentation, can save you a lot of time in future when you want to get the website site redeveloped or add new features to it in the future.)

Do they give you training on how to use your website? It may sound silly but if you don’t know how to effectively use and market your website, then you will not get the results you want from it, far too often companies will charge thousands to develop a site and not tell their customers how to actually use it.  (good design, tool tips and notes on how to use admin areas and forms, PDF manuals and proper planning and communication during development with testing, video tutorials and guides, and of course hands on training and instruction are all as important as the site itself.)

If you’re going to maintain the site yourself, then ask them how they can design your web site so that you can effective and easily maintain it. (Off the shelf products such as WordPress and Joomla are great for self maintenance as they are well documented with community support, have 1000s of free plugins to add new features, they are regular patched for security issues and updated to make sure they remain stable and up to date with the security latest threats and modern technologies, which leaves you free to work on the content of your web site!)

Tell the prospective website designer what your deadlines are and ask if they can meet them. Many good website designers are already booked for the next 4-6 weeks, so you may have to wait for them to get to your website.

Your website is crucial to the success of your business. By doing extensive interviewing of potential website designers, you’re more likely to pick one that can do the work you want, is willing to really listen to you, can create a site that reflects you and your business, and keeps within your budget and timeframe.

How to choose a web designer

Always be wary when choosing a designer — there are many who claim to be qualified but have no real experience. Ask to see examples of previous work. A good web designer should be able to do all of the following:

•     Provide clear and quality designs, through a process of development and feedback towards a planned goal, with your input every step of the way.
•     Know of and be able to work with all modern languages and technologies such as JavaScript, AJAX PHP, HTML, and CSS.
•     Create websites optimised for search engines which are valid HTML, and offer sound SEO advice, reports, and solutions for search engine optimisation.
•     Be able to help you secure affordable and reliable secure web hosting, domain name purchasing and help with support, email, and related subjects.

Even if you don’t need these things for your website, any half-decent web designer will have these skills so it’s a good way to make sure they are competent. If they are lacking in any of these areas, they probably aren’t qualified to work on your website.

Ask what they will do to optimise the site for search engines. If they don’t know, or if they say that choosing good metatags is all you need to do, then they don’t really know what they are doing.

Ask how they approach the construction of your site. How will they go about determining your needs? Will you be consulted during construction? How often? What happens if you don’t like their design?

Get them to be clear about everything, and get it written down in a contract.

Last but not least, ask about cost. You should not be quoted more than a few thousand pounds for a basic 10 page website, most websites can be made for much less than this.

Hopefully this gives you some idea of what to look for.

Getting your work done at a lesser price

Save Money With Freelancing

Freelancers are a good bet for various reasons, as they have some undeniable advantages over traditional web design companies. They are cheaper and if you choose the right freelancer for the job, it is quite possible that you will get a better price and product than you would have got if you had hired a traditional high street web design company.

They can help you save almost 50% to 60% of the cost that you would have to pay, than if you had hired a traditional high street web design company.

Let’s suppose you want a 10 page database driven website with CMS. A web design company will bill you around 2 to 3 thousand pounds for this project of yours, with a freelancer you will be required to pay only a fraction of the cost for this work, which means you will save almost 60% of the total cost on your project.

Again on occasions hiring an in-house web developer to work for you full time can just not be economically viable at the time, and once again outsourcing offers a good way to get round this problem by buying in development as and when it is needed, and many freelancers will also provide maintenance contracts and support, which mean you can also get a good level of service for value for money.

There are many reasons for why freelancer can work out cheaper, typically they do not have so many overheads as a traditional web design company, they cut out the middle man working with the only the designer or developer, and freelancing is a competitive environment in which many jobs are put up for auction for the lowest price meaning that the average freelancer has to be cost effective to beat the competition, traditional companies on the other hand often only chase the “big” projects and are not interested in small businesses or simple jobs, very often they will feel justified in charging large sums of money for their reputation, they have to pay for big offices, expensive salesmen who will baffle and confuse you by promising everything without knowing what they are talking about, and of course charge unrealistically inflated prices for it all.

It pays to do some research into the actual cost of what you are paying for and buying, ask the company to tell you how many hours of work is involved in the cost, ask them how much individual items such as domain names and hosting cost, get them to spec out the project out for you and detail everything, as with some research you will find that many companies charge things like £200 a month for hosting which only needs to cost £20 a year, with high markups on stock images, design and massive profit margins in terms of actual time taken to build your site and actual cost to them.

In web design terms the old adage of you get what you pay for is not always true, and indeed to many companies the motto of one born every minute seems more their slogan!

The trick with freelancing is however to get the right person for the job, which is not always the cheapest, as it is even easier  to hire someone with no skill, experience or qualifications who will not give you the web site you want or require and which will lead to effective results, it pays to find out about the person you pay to do your job.