Top 10 Tips for Choosing a Web Designer for Your Business Web Site

How to Choose a Web Design Firm

Simple. You do your homework on them. Then, you start asking questions and taking notes. There are plenty of web designers available. You want to go with the best because, in fact, your web designer is in essence your partner. You want to choose a designer that takes YOUR business seriously.

What questions do you ask?

There are several important questions to ask when choosing a web designer for your business web site.

Creating your web site can be a tricky process. Choosing the best web design firm for your business web site is a very important decision. And if your company is like most small businesses, you probably do not have web design experience. Building your web site will take time and work. And working with a web designer is no easy task. So choose the right web design company from the start and avoid do-over's, which can be costly and time consuming.

1. What kind of web experience do you have?

For starters, find out what kind of design experience your potential design firm has. Do they have experience with content management systems such as Joomla or Drupal, do they have experience working with "raw" HTML? Has the web design company created web sites similar to yours? Do they have relevant industry experience? If you want to sell products through your web site and accept credit card payments, does the web design company you are considering have experience with ecommerce hosting?

2. Do you have a portfolio that I can review?

An experienced web design company will have a solid portfolio of web sites that they have created for other clients. Ask for links to other site the design company has created and review each one. Do you like what you see? Do the sites have a style that appeals to you?

3. Do you have any references?

In addition to reviewing web sites, ask for customer references. Contact their clients and ask them about their experience with the web design company. Were they happy with the results? Did they get what they paid for? How much did they pay? Would they recommend them? How long did it take? What didn't they like about the company? How responsive was the company when they had questions?

4. What are your prices?

The most important step in pricing is to make sure the potential design company outline all of the prices associated with the work and puts it all in writing. Never enter into a deal unless all of the costs are well understood up front.

Ask them a bit about how they manage payments. If they respond in a very business-like and professional manner, this is a good sign. If they throw out answers like - "Don't worry, we'll manage" or "Whatever you are comfortable with", don't be fooled. This is trouble waiting to happen. Get the price in writing before you begin the project.

Choosing the Right Web Designer

So, you've finally decided that you need a web site for your business? Well, there are a few key-points to remember BEFORE you make one of the most crucial decisions for your business.

Choosing the right designer for your new business web site:

When it comes to choosing the right web designer for your web site, you should always shop around first to check out all of the available options. There are many web design companies out there to choose from. And most of them are pretty good at what they do.

Always ask to see samples of a web designer's previous work and examine their portfolio. This will help you get a better feel for the style of sites any particular web designer is capable of doing. Most of the time, web designers have their own unique style and you can easily spot which designs they've done in the past. I mean, it's similar to any other artist's style; you can definitely spot their previous works based on the general layout, color scheme, and over-all visual appearance of the sites.

Experience is also a key factor here. Just like any other craft, web designers get better with experience. So naturally, you'll be better off by choosing a web designer who has more experience under his or her belt.

Another key point you should define is whether or not the web designer can make you a 100% custom web site. Or will it be just a basic template web design that 100's or even 1,000's of people already have across the Internet. Pretty much anybody these days can create a basic HTML web page in Microsoft Word or Publisher and change the title of it to reflect their Branson business. But you must ask yourself: "is this really what I'm looking for"?

Web sites that are truly custom built will stand out more the rest of the basic template web designs that so many people are using these days. A custom web design will catch the eye of your potential customers and show them that you have a really professional web presence and you mean business.

A lot of web designers these days choose to do the template web sites for one of 2 reasons:

It's cheaper to use a basic template web design. They might be lacking the necessary skills needed to develop a fully custom web site. Whatever the case may be, make sure you go with a designer who is capable of creating a custom web design for you. It will inevitably cost you more for a custom site. But it is totally worth the extra money spent. Trust me, in the end you will be much happier with your web site if it is a site that's unique and created for just your business and not everybody else's.

Graphical Updates Of Web Designs

Web design is creation of designs in the web pages of the web site. Web design constitutes more innovated and technical aspects with huge information. Web designs are the process of modeling, designing, structuring and executing the aspects which are suitable for the web site. Web designs may comes up with collections of more designs as per the ideas and plans to make the web site with more new web designs. Web designs include contents, files, tags, update pages, graphics and so on. Generally web designs comprises of innovated and graphical techniques as well as they are created to become easy approachable to the web searchers and it is done using wide understandable techniques.

Generally, web site comprises of web designs and web designs forms major part of the web site. Today, in this competitive world web design fetches more demand and it comes through all over the world. Nowadays, most of the people started knowing the need of the web design and started utilizing it. Hardly web designs become more important and essential for every web masters who handles web sites. Web designs provides well designed and graphical web site to the web searchers and also for the web masters. Web designs are done by the web designers and if they design the web completely, then it can be said that the web site fetches more offers from the customers as well as more response among the web searchers.

Nowadays, most of the web designers are capable of offering efficient technical and graphical web designs to the web sites. To make the web design effective and efficient, then the web master should provide and use some techniques and tips for it. Generally an efficient web design comes up with good presentation of graphics and designs. To make it efficient, professional web site designer's help can be taken and they are the one who can provides efficient web designs to the users. Generally, web designs constitute text, graphics, designs and images. Web masters designs web sites to increase the traffic, rankings and links in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Msn.

Web designs can be made using efficient web designers and he may use more application such as CSS, HTML and many other kinds of languages. Every web designs made by the web designer should be compact and the web design created should be structured has it is easy approachable and easily understandable to the web searchers. When proper web designing is done for the web site, then the particular web site fetches more demand among the web searchers as well as the web designers come up with more popularity among the people.

How to Choose Web Design Company?

Web Design Company

There are many people on internet who call themselves as web designers and web design companies. Many people do it for fun, as a hobby or part-time. Web design companies full-time operations are way to go.. Web design companies doing it for living will take your project seriously. Make sure your web design company has done enough research on internet technologies.

5 firm steps for finding the right Web design company for you

1. Assess your needs:

A professional Web design company will work with you rather than for you. It will help you in defining your organization's requirements. Still, you should have a basic idea of what your web site can do for you. Will it serve as an informative catalog? Will it grab new clients? Will it strengthen relationship with your existing clients? Will it serve the needs of your workers?

There are few initial requirements your organization should aware of:

The intended audience for the Web site

The intended goal of the project

Anticipated budget for the Web site

How the project will fit into a larger marketing/corporate scheme

The individuals/departments within your organization responsible for the project

These initial requirements will help you finding web design firm best suited for your project. You should document them and use them as a basis for evaluating each web design firm. This document will serve as your benchmark to measure each web design firm.

2. List Generation:

You can use many ways to search web design firm. There are strengths and weaknesses on selecting a method to search for web design firm. Combination of different approaches will be your best bet in hunt of web design firm for your project.

Competitors' web sites:

Look for web sites of organizations that you like, mainly web sites of your competitors. Sometimes you have to look for web sites other than your industry. Mostly, web design firm includes site credits (example: developed by 4MDESIGNERS). You can simply visit web design firm's web site and carry on your analysis. If you cannot find the credits on the site, feel free to contact the organization and ask which Web design firm is responsible for the web site? You can at least have some comments about that web design firm from the organization you will be contacting.

Ask your Social Circle and Family:

Choosing the Right Web Designer

Creating your web site can be a tricky process. Choosing the best web design company for your site is extremely important. Unless you run a web-based business, you probably do not have web design experience within your company. Building your web site will take time and a little homework!

To create a web site for your business, follow these 4 simple steps:

1. Establish your goals
2. Determine your budget
3. Pick a web design company
4. Pick a web hosting company

Establish Your Goals

Before you begin looking for company to help you design and build your web site, take the time to understand the goals of your web site. This will be extremely important to help set expectations with the web design company you choose.

In order to set your web site goals, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want a web site?
• Are you selling something?
• Do you have a catalog of products that changes on a regular basis?
• Who is your target market?
• Do you already have a brand?
• What is your industry?
• Who are your competitors?
• Do they already have web sites? If so, what do they look like?
• If you're selling something, will you accept credit cards over the internet?
• How soon do you want your web site?
• What happens if you never create a web site for your business?

Take the time to answer each of the above questions and if you have time, write the answers down on a sheet of paper. These are the same questions most web design companies will ask you before they begin to create your site. If you have these questions answered up front, you will have some criteria for choosing the right web design company. For example, if you are a real estate agent, and want to publish listings on your web site, you should seek a web design company that knows about the real estate business and has created web pages for other real estate agents.

Determine Your Budget

How much do you want to spend on your web site. Web sites can cost you anywhere from $100 to $100,000 depending upon what you want it to do. Know your spending constraints before you begin negotiating with design companies. Whatever you do, do not tell a web design company what your budget is!! Always get pricing based on your needs, not you budget.

Pick a Web Design Company

Your choice of a web design company is a very important step. Take your time to investigate all of your options. Here are some important items to consider.