How to Pick a Good Website Designer? (page 2 of 2)
You would like to find a good website designer? We all wish to earn huge amount of money without making much effort. If done correctly, the “e-business” or “online” world has provided most of us this opportunity to put forth a generous effort and work from home or from an office with an online portal that can potentially bring us a revenue stream. One of the most popular and rewarding businesses online is to earn revenue through websites that utilize a business idea and bring it to life online.
A website is an important part of any business today. An online presence is an important factor for many companies. Plain and simply put, if you are a “state of the art” company in ANY industry, you need a website! But, what kind of website? The size and kind of business doesn’t matter at all. The Internet isn’t a fad and should be taken seriously for any business and also, in turn, when getting a company online for the first time, should also be taken seriously by the person or company who is conveying your message through a website.
But, let me ask, is it good enough to just have a regular static website? A properly developed website is going to add to the growth of your business. It can be a safe haven for your customer and potential future customers to become aware of your business and your products, whatever they may be. Your website design is where you boast your business. So, without a doubt, have an impressive website is extremely important.
Purposing web design is a complex, but essential ongoing activity. Before creating and uploading a website, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what is needed in the website. Thoroughly considering the audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose and deciding what content will be developed, are extremely important.
DEFINITION OF WEBDESIGN: Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, microblogging clients and RSS readers.
DEFINITION OF A WEBSITE DEVELOPER: A Web developer uses his/her skills to build and maintains websites. People who conceptualize and plan out the website are actually Web designers. Developers are the people who use some form of HTML to build the actual pages. A Web developer’s other responsibilities could include, writing the code, optimizing the site for search engines(SEO), creating and optimizing graphics for the Web and producing rich media such as Flash, streaming media, or online audio.
Finding a good web designer for your needs can be a challenging task.
Some website developers have been very successful in creating websites that have delivered thousands of dollars off of a few lonely pages. This is rare, but has been done. Some developers have taken 5k pages and designed sites that just “sit there” and do nothing. Word of warning, there are some designers that work at “cut” rates can make for you a website that probably won’t meet your requirements or expectations.
Here are some basic steps that you can follow to make sure a website designer is suitable and OK for you to hire for the needs of your website.
- Visit his/her Sites: Make sure you visit his/her portfolio website. If they don’t have one, do not hire them. You should like the site itself. If should be easy to navigate. If a designer cannot produce a quality website for him/herself, how will s/he make your pages look good?
- Clients: In the online portfolio of the prospective website designer, visit websites s/he has created for some of his other clients. Contact his old clients for recommendations. Each designer has his/her own style. Whether it will match your needs can be seen from his/her previous projects.
- Cross Browser Compatible: Visit his client’s websites the prospective website designer has created with different browsers(Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc). A quality designer will make a website look equally good on different browsers. This is something very important since nowadays people use many different browsers to view the web.
- Search Engine Optimization: Visit Google and plug them into the search engine. Check how the sites of your prospective website designer rank in Google and Yahoo. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an absolute and cannot be overlooked when picking a prospective website designer. A good website designer should be able to write and produce pages with clear structure that are easy for the search engines to crawl.
- Flash Only: Our recommendation is to avoid using designers that produce Flash-only websites. Websites that utilize “flash only” implementation usually have terrible Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and do not rank high in the search engines which will affect the popularity of your pages. This is important
- Hard Coded or Program Generated: Ask your prospective website designer if they use a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) program as in FrontPage or Dreamweaver to create websites or makes websites with a Content Management System (CMS) applications. Today’s Content Management System (CMS) are very good and should be used for all website development. Having a “dynamically” generated website will have a huge benefit in the future and should be considered
- Communication: Your prospective website designer should be easy to communicate with. Communication between emails shouldn’t go more than a few hours repetitively. If your prospective website designer takes over a day to communicate with you regularly, then you should not hire them. Your prospective website designer should be easily accessible via messenger, email or by phone calls.
You may find a number of designers who pretend to be good website designers but their work speaks for themselves. So, rather than giving the work of developing your website to just anyone, you must spend some time educating yourself on website designers. There are some website designers who charge $300 for a 10 page website and there are designers, as well, who charge over $3000 for the same number of pages in a website.
You can also seek recommendations from your coworkers and others who are doing business online. Sources like yellow pages include web designers which are working in big companies. So if you find potential web designers from such sources then be ready to pay a good amount.
Finding and locating a good website designer, shouldn’t be a huge task. Just do your homework and you will be well educated in the subject. Hopefully my article has given you some tips and some ideas on what to look for when trying to locate and choosing prospective website designer.
About the Author: Tony Eden is the president of AR WebSolutions, Inc. He runs the design company of www.3MultiMedia.com and www.SurfCityHosting.com. He has created over 300 websites in his 10+ years of designing websites.
