What Should I Look For When Hiring A Web Designer?

Investing in a new website can be an expensive and often time consuming job, with plenty of factors to think about before you take the plunge. You shouldn’t have to settle for just any web design company, instead you need to make sure you know what you’re getting into!  

Your website is one of the biggest tools your business has to offer, which is why it’s so important that you get it right. If you’re looking to invest the time and money into a new website, then you need to find a web design company who can offer you a site build for both you and your audiences personal needs.

So how do you go about finding a great web designer? With these 8 tips you can gain some important insights into what you need to know about finding a professional web design service, perfect for you.  

First Things First 

Know What You Want 

Before you go searching for a new website designer you need to know exactly what you want from your website. By making a list of websites you like, other businesses that you admire and knowing the reasons why you like them, you can gain more of an idea of what you’re looking to achieve from your website functions and overall web site design. By giving your website designer an idea of what you want, they can get an understanding of what you like and develop a style for you. 

By not knowing what you want it can be difficult to gauge whether or not your web designer is capable of giving you the service you require, giving a vague idea of what’s you want, won’t help anyone, even the most talented website designer. So before you even call your first web design company, you need to know what you want!   

5 Things You Need To Consider

With an idea of what you’re after now in mind, let’s take a look at the 5 important questions you need to ask when hunting for the best website designer for you.  

Is Your Web Design Company Established? 

Experience does matter, which is why it’s so important to find an experienced web design team to work on your project. Remember however, experience doesn’t always come with age, by monitoring how long they have been operational, how many clients they may have and also ultimately the quality of the work within their portfolio, you can gain an insight into how experienced this company may be. 

A stable web design company usually has a decent amount of happy clients, meaning they have experience dealing with a variety of business types, projects and can deal with any issues they come across, as well as indicating they can deal with time management and deadlines. 

By asking these three simple questions, in addition you can narrow down how established the company may be.  

• How many clients do you have?
• How long have you been around?
• Can I see your work? 

Is My Content Updatable? 

It’s a good idea to make sure you have access to a website that is fully updatable, letting you and your team update and edit the website content whenever you want. Even if you’re not looking to update the content yourself, it’s good to have the option that allows you to make simple changes without having to get in touch with you website provider and potentially be having to spend more money in order for them to make the changes. 

By having a website built on a system which is updatable, you can save your business plenty of expense further down the line and also can indicate that your website provider isn’t just looking to try and grab your money just to make a simple change such as an image change or a change to your text.  

Can I Get Support?

Does the web design company you’re looking at offer you ongoing support with your website? If not this could be a problem. It’s important that you choose a company that can offer you cost effective and reliable support on an ongoing basis. Whether something has gone slightly wrong or whether you simply have a question that needs to be answered, it’s important you have a professional company willing to help you out along the way. 

Without the right support you can find your business struggling to understand what might be going wrong, spending time and money paying others to look into any problems, something that is not only frustrating but something that also leads to wasted time, that could have been spent invested into running your business.

Here’s just a few things to double check you can get the support with: 

• Your hosting 
• Your emails
• Your content management system
• Your commerce setup 

What About Pricing? 

Website prices vary a lot, even for the same job from company to company. While it can be tempting to go for a web design company who offer you the cheapest option, it’s also incredibly important that you know exactly what you’re buying and why it might happen to be so much cheaper than the others. Cheap websites can have limitations and even hidden costs that can actually end up costing your business even more in the long run, something you need to be aware of before you settle for a site. 

Ultimately your website is an investment, it’s a long term project that can benefit your business hugely not only in the present but also well into the future. If you’re willing to consider spending a little extra now when choosing the best company for your website, you can invest in a money making and marketing tool that should work for years to come.  

Do You Monitor Your Websites?

Investing your money into a website is all well and good but it’s also important that this website is monitored and tracked even after completion. If you aren’t monitoring the success of your website through monitoring conversions, sales, traffic, bounce rate etc, you could be missing out on a number of optimisation and marketing opportunities that could benefit your business. While analytics tools like Google analytics works to monitor the behaviour of your website visitors it’s also a good idea to know that your website provider are available to track your website from the back end. 

However you monitor your success, you need to make sure you track it and make sure that you won’t be left with a website that looks great and works perfectly but that you don’t know how it’s actually effecting your leads, sales, traffic and the overall success of your business. 

Finding the right web design company for your business can be tricky, especially for bespoke projects, however all it takes is meeting with the right people for you and having an understanding of the questions you need to ask. With so many web design firms out there and more appearing each day, there’s a lot of great companies and plenty who can’t offer you a full service. 

If you’re looking for more information about finding the best services for your business or even if you’re looking to develop a new site, we can help, why not contact us today?