How To Choose The Right Company For Your Website Design Project.

Being a small business owner or simply when you need to market your products or services online, you are left with an important and crucial strategic decision. A website can bring you more business and a bad one can drive away customers. Selecting the right website designer is essential.

Outlined in this article are some important factors to consider when selecting a website designer that will have your product or service at heart and make that shine…

The different people that are involved in completing a website;

• Website Designer

A website designer main duty is to help determine the page layout, graphics, text location and colours of a website. Website designer also helps with the navigation and how pages will cross-link to one another.

• Website Programmer

Website Programmer mainly takes the design from the Designer and creates the code to make a website run smoothly. The programmer is also responsible for all the technical stuff that is not seen by visitors and happens behind-the-scenes to make sure a website works properly.

• Graphic Designer

A graphic designer is responsible for creating the graphics for the website, this may include; page layout, colours, logo, photos, illustrations, etc. The best way to describe a graphic designer is as the “visual artist” that assist in branding your website.

• Internet Marketing Consultant

Internet marketing consultant helps you to determine how your website fits into your overall marketing strategy, and how to get more traffic and sales from your website through strategies that range from Search Engine Optimization to link building to online marketing like pay per click Google Ads

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can get all four of these skills from the same company.

How can you identify a good website developing company and how much do they charge?

When deciding on a company suitable for your website development project will depend on factors like whether you want to work locally with someone, if you are comfortable with working remotely with them over the phone or video conference.

Some things to keep in mind when making your decision;

• Are they asking questions: This can include questions like; the type of your business, your target market, marketing goals, etc.? If they don’t ask questions, how can they design a site that reflects your brand, and your business
• Portfolio: Looking at their work will give a clear indication of what to expect. Look at sites they’ve designed to see if you like their style. Pay attention to see if they are, they flexible in their designs?
• Graphics Design: Ask them if they did the actual graphics and layout design of the site, or if they just did the programming. If they don’t do the graphics work themselves, can they recommend a graphic designer?
• Structure: Do they have a structured planning process that outlines what to expect from start to finish documenting progress reporting.
• Knowledge: Don’t be afraid to find out if they can handle internet marketing and search engine optimization.
• Domain Name: Make sure you own your domain name, even if the website designer registered it for you.
• Project cost: Find out how you will be billed, what the monthly costs will be or how often you can expect an invoice from them. Pay attention to whether they’ll try to stick within your budget, or whether they keep suggesting new add-ons that increase to the cost of your site. Remember, designers aren’t responsible for your budget – you are!
• Word of mouth: Talk to some of their current and recent clients, to see how smooth the process was. You want someone who has good project management skills AND good communication skills.
• After Sales Service: Ask them whether they will maintain your site after the initial design, and how much they’ll charge for that. Some designers want to create new sites but don’t want to maintain them. If you’re going to maintain the site yourself, ask them if they’ll design your site so that it is easily maintained by a business owner. You can have your site designed on a platform like WordPress, which will allow you to edit the text and some of the graphics.

It is important to remember that whoever you decide on as a partner for your website development project, must be someone that you believe will act ethically and even though it sounds weird… you have to like speaking to them. They will be directly responsible for your online brand building… If you cannot communicate with your developer and know that they will stay focused on your project, I am sorry to mention to you, you are wasting your time.

Your website is crucial to the success of your business. By doing extensive interviewing of potential website designers, you’re more likely to pick one that can do the work you want, is willing to really listen to you, can create a site that reflects you and your business, and keeps within your budget and timeframe