How to choose the right web design company for your business?

How to choose the right web design company for your business?

Many company and business owners will know, understand and often live by the rule of recognizing that in order to succeed within a strong competitive market you will need to be able to offer the best brand experience for all of your customers, both loyal and potential. During the past decade the way businesses market their brand has changed significantly with many thanks to social media platforms and also mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. These new methods of browsing and buying have allowed consumers great power to choose the brand they wish to commit too. This new type of consumer can often leave business owners with the fundamental task of finding the right and best website design company or agency to deliver your company’s message to your targeted audience and potential customers in the most effective and efficient way possible. Without a properly designed website, you are unfortunately placing your company and brand at an incredibly large disadvantage if you are trying to grow your company’s brand on the world wide web when your website is compared to your competitors who may be doing it far better. There is an abundance of professional website designers, agencies and companies out there and readily available for you to choose from. Many of which understand that a clean and effective website that is well designed and laid out properly can help you grow your business and brand with ease. So before you begin to choose through the mountain of agencies out there, it is important to understand what basic things you should expect and what your designer should be doing for you.

Design your website's physical design such as layout, colours, etc.
Setup your websites CMS.
Place any static web pages that you may need.
Setup a control panel or publishing page where you can add new content/products and add your own SEO goals. WordPress is a good example of this for beginners.
Provide you with any logins and passwords to the CMS so you can edit the website.
Inform you of how to use the CMS if you don't understand.

Now that we understand what to expect from our web designer, it’s important as to where they come from. Will you choose a individual, from an agency or go directly to a recommended company? Below you will find five quick tips on how to choose the right web designer for your company. Take a look at the designer’s portfolio. As like many artists, web designers all come with their own bespoke design style. This means you will more than likely find a designer who creates websites with the exact look that you want for your company branding. If you have found a designer or a company, make sure that you browse through the samples of websites on their portfolio. Communicate with the designer, tell them what you need. As with any good service, you expect them to be honest. A good designer should be entirely honest with you and tell you exactly how capable they are at achieving what you are looking for. The true sign of a good designer is that they will talk about your company, your services and products to gain a real insight on what angles to take when designing your website. Don’t choose a designer/company that promises to put your website on the first page of Google. Placing your website on the front page and the first rank of Google is not your website designers job. Their job is to design and to provide you with the necessary tools so that your website has the potential to get to the front page of Google and other search engines. Any designer or company who promises the first page of Google in their sales package should be avoided. Don’t choose a design company who will charge you to make updates. Every website on the world wide web is continually in progress. When a website is ‘finished’ it never truly is, as new products and content should be added on a regular basis. This means, if you are a company that needs to update their website with new content and products each week or month, you do not want to be spending a fortune updating it. Don’t choose a designer who designs websites all in Flash. Many of us are aware that Google can search Flash websites, but they often come across tacky and dated. It increases website load time significantly (which may hurt your ranking), they don’t work on all browsers, they certainly do not work on some mobile devices and flash websites are not always user friendly.