Selecting a Web Designing Firm – 10 Things to Look For

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.