Entrusting your web designing assignment to the wrong hands may prove to be a real costly affair. Leave alone the cost involved, a badly designed, messy website can completely ruin your business and damage your reputation, rather than doing any good. So, on what criteria should you select you web designing firm? Here is a quick checklist of 10 important things you should look for:
1. Web Designing Firm’s Own Website
What’s your impression about their website? Of course, the requirements of each website are different and you can’t expect it to be exactly the same as you want your website to be, but do you think you’d love to have a website like theirs, if you were in their business? It’s okay even if you like their website with a few modifications here and there. But if their website design completely puts you off, then probably it’s an indication that you should look somewhere else.
2. Portfolio
Have a look at their portfolio. Kind of websites they have already designed will give you a fair idea as to what they have in store for you. And if they have designed something related to your niche, nothing can make things more clear than that.
3. Focus on Actual Work, Not the Freebies
Never go by the freebies. Always remember, website designing is what you need. If you can’t get a satisfactory website designed, you’ll be at loss even if you get hundreds of freebies.
4. Specific Requirements
What are your specific requirements? And how good are the designers at meeting them? For example, if you are looking for ecommerce website design, then are they good at integrating payment gateway, shopping cart, CRM, cross selling tools, etc. and taking care of other requisites?
5. Transparency
Are they transparent about their work? What all tools do they use? Is the content part outsourced or done in-house? What would be the image sources? Will the final output be W3C compliant? A good web design firm should be able to address all your concerns satisfactorily.
6. Cool Design & Ease of Use
Don’t forget, this is the main job you are hiring the designers for. If the website is not appealing to the eyes, it’s worth nothing, no matter what all great utilities it offers. Add to this the ease of use (I don’t want to add eleventh point for that, I’ve already given the title J)
7. Technical Knowledge
Your web designers need not be rocket scientists. But it is imperative that they are up-to-date with the latest developments in web design technology to ensure that your website is not out-of-date even before it is created.
8. Secure and Light Coding
See to it that their coding style is lightweight and secure. Clean coding will help your site load faster and secure coding will prevent against hacking and other exploitation.
9. SEO
If you thought you would start with SEO after the designing part is over, think again – website layout, navigation, architecture, images, content, and so many other elements – everything has to do with SEO. So, before you proceed, find out how well your designers can optimize your site for search engines.
10. Price
This should not need much explanation. But remember, costly need not always mean good. Ensure that you get value for money, and the pricing is within your budget.
A very informative article. Can you tell me what can be the cost of a simple e-commerce enabled website?
First of all, thank you for sharing this info. What is your opinion on outsourcing your website’s web design? Is it better to hire a team from your area? Or is it better to outsource the job to India?
Nice Tips,I am looking for web designer for my website with above qualities 😀
For me personally, I think the #9 is the most important part. How many times we have seen nice templates that takes ages to load? I think all the webdesigners should be more focus on SEO compatibility.
This blog really cool for designer great information about the web designing thanks for this post i like it
Yes, web design definitely is very important regardless of SEO, etc. There are sites that seem to be high in rankings that are not very user friendly.
Noted down every points. I have started one and your post helps me to move ahead better results and cost saving too.
Thanks
Jackie
A good post. Also make sure that you ask lots of questions at all stages of the project and provide a much detail as you can about your requirements. In particular its vital that once the designer has produced a draft design for you that you are 100% happy with every detail of that design before you proceed. It’s VERY easy for a web designer to keep changing the design at the draft stage, but it’s much more difficult to change it later once it’s been coded.
lovely all points is very good and valid i 100% agree about SEO point before making any web layout have to keep all on page SEO tricks in the mind
I am amazed at how many so called web designer have no portfolio page.