Top Things to Look at on a Web Designer’s Site
If you are thinking about getting a new website designed, it might be a good idea to look at the person that is going to design your site’s…site.
What do you look for and how do you verify if they are up to par? Well there are a couple things you might want to look before you just hand over your hard earned money.
First things first. If their site is in flash it is a good idea to start thinking of another design firm right then. Reason is because with all the news going on where Google and HTML 5 they are saying we don’t like Flash, and second the search engines despise Flash.
I have had people ask me before about Flash and wanted to get flash done on their site at the start of their design. But this is a first indicator that you should either try to convince the client that this is not a good idea or just save yourself the gray hair and later stress of telling them why they will not even be found for their own domain name…tell them you are too busy.
The second thing is their portfolio, if they have one. A lot of web designers don’t rely on their websites to get new business. They rely on Word of Mouth or Networking. This can work, it is like the mechanic with a car on bricks on their front lawn.
But if the company you are talking to, you found online and they don’t have images of their previous work then it might be two things. Either they have no work history, or their designs are so bad that they don’t want the world to know about their work. Or last, they are so damn busy that they haven’t had time to work on their own stuff. I believe in all honesty if you are trying to promote yourself as a designer and you don’t have images of your work then you suck. You might be investing 1000’s of dollars with these people and the fact that they couldn’t find the time during the weekend or some downtime to upload some portfolio images on their site is sad.
The third thing you will want to make sure of is, that the usability is easy. If you can’t find the contact button or know what they are about right off the bat, then there is a chance that they will design a site like that for you as well. Or it might be that they know the code side of the web, but don’t have a clue on how to market or design funnels for you to follow through their site. Again this will be your website after they finish it. So it might be a good idea to pass them by as well.
Another idea is to check to see if they are W3 Complaint. If they design crappy code and it is not easy to follow what they did, they didn’t tab things correctly so you can’t follow the comments. Basically this means you will have to slowly figure out their code if you ever want someone else to change it. Not good. Not meaning that you will do this yourself. But think about it. You hire someone to fix your site, they will have to spend at least a couple hours trying to figure out how to work through their code. Just a tip.
Another thing to consider, is if the company you are going to work with wants to put you into a proprietary CMS that they only understand. That means that from now until forever they will be the only designers that you will ever be able to use. Not good if you don’t like the dudes and want to break the ties later in time.
Hope this gets you a start as to what to look for in a design firm. If you have another thing please let me know, by leaving a comment.
I want to say thanks first for reading over this post. I sincerely hope you learned something new. I have a lot of stuff just like this that you might like as well. You can find more about my expertise as a internet marketing consultant on my website. Please subscribe to my mailing list where I detail all of my good findings on the web and break it down so you can keep up with what is important online.
Author: Brett J Burky
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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