How To Choose A Web Designer For Your Business

If you want to stand a chance of achieving any form of personal or commercial success through your internet site, you might wish to consider the services of a professional website designer. Companies such as CSI Media Web Designers and others are well-known in the web design industry but how do you choose one from another?

Here are a few thoughts that you may find helpful.

Track record

It isn’t difficult to set yourself up as an internet site design company and you certainly don’t need any credentials to do so. However, success is one qualification that is a pretty powerful credential in its own right, so, if your designer has been around for some years, the chances are that they are doing something right!

Site quality

It may sound like a case of stating the obvious, but if the site of the design company itself leaves something to be desired in terms of usability or visual impact, then it may not be a positive indication of the sorts of design services you are likely to receive as a customer.

Testimonials

This really comes into two categories:

• on-site freebie testimonials and;
• objective existing customer references.

Testimonials listed on a potential designer’s own site are, possibly, less than totally meaningful. It might take a very brave company indeed to publish negative feedback about their own services.

Some might be able to provide you with a number of existing customers that you are free to contact to obtain a view as to their capabilities. Of course, they may be what are known as tame customers, yet even so, it might be more beneficial than simply reading on-site testimonials.

Size and viability

Even if you have no great financial exposure to them, you might not want to come in one morning halfway through your design project, only to find that your designer has just gone out of business. It therefore makes common sense to do the usual background financial checks on the company before committing to them.

Industry gossip

It’s worth doing some internet searches of the design industry’s various sites and gossip columns. Check if your potential designer is getting any press and if they are, that is the sort of coverage you would want to see before giving someone your business.

It might also be worth making the effort to ask around.  If nobody has ever heard of them, it might not be a particularly positive indication of their presence in their own marketplace.

Bring yourself up to speed with current trends and issues

It can be a little tricky to assess the capabilities of an internet designer if you yourself are something of a technical dinosaur.

You could get someone to help you interrogate the designer’s knowledge or if that isn’t practical, try spending an hour or two doing a little basic research on the net.

You’ll quickly see what the current trends and approaches are. Even with a very limited amount of research, you might be able to ask some pertinent questions of your designer.  If those questions result in blank looks, then you might wish to interpret that as a warning sign!