Choosing the right web designers
Choosing the right company to partner with when you are creating your website is vital to the success of the project. Here are a couple of questions that may help guide you in evaluating a company’s service.
Are they designers or developers?
Some companies offer web sites in addition to their main business. A number of graphic designers and printers have branched out into the web development business. Equally, many software houses have moved across into web design.
Building a web site is a highly technical process. Designing a web site is a highly creative process. The current philosophy is let a graphic designer design the web site but get a web developer to develop it. Most web development companies will be happy to work in conjunction with a graphic design company.
How big is the company?
People sometimes assume a company with more money, employees; office space etc will be more capable than one with less. The size of the company is a good indication of its capabilities but also of its overheads. A large company is often unresponsive and tends to have a higher charge out rate.
A one man band can be much cheaper and keener to please but can sometimes be overwhelmed by larger, more complex projects. Can you contact them during working hours? If you have a limited budget that might be fine but if you are talking about a serious web development project these kinds of groups will get out of their depth very quickly.
Can they build what you want?
The easiest way to find out if they are capable is to look at their portfolio and see if they have created a similar website in the past. Do you like them? Are they visually appealing? More importantly, can you us them? Can they give you client testimonials? Will they let you talk to their past clients? Is their service of a standard that their clients will recommend them?
Will they help you with search engine visibility?
Creating a site in the right way is vital for Search engine optimization. Will the development company offer you advice on how to write content for search engines? Will they create the website code in the correct way? Will you be left with a site that looks good but nobody can find?
Do they host the site themselves?
If they do host the site themselves have they got the capability to offer 24 hour support, uninterrupted power supply, large enough bandwidth, security etc. The company has to be quite large to be able to compete with a dedicated hosting provider.
How accessible are their sites?
Will they create a website that adopts the latest standards and complies with the DDA Disability Discrimination Act 1995? Have they got experience in creating ‘A’, ‘AA’ or ‘AAA’ sites.
Are you tied in to them once your site is built?
This is probably the biggest problem faced by website owners. This is not so much a problem with the technology that the site has been coded in as long as they use one of the industry standard technologies such as PHP, ASP and Cold Fusion. The problem is if the web development company has based the site around a proprietary content management system (CMS) and refuses to let other developers to access and modify the website code.
One solution is to have a preexisting agreement that the site could be hosted and maintained by a third party if a dispute arose. That way if you are unhappy with them you can go to another company for hosting and future development work. Sometimes this may involve a licensing fee for the CMS.