A company’s webpage is the face of its business. It’s the first thing clients see, it’s the medium that connects you and your audience, and the most important factor in having a good webpage is hiring a great web designer.  

So what makes a great web designer for your business? Here are 6 tips and guidelines in hiring someone who would suit your business.

 

• Identify your needs

 

Before you even begin the hunting process, you need to understand what you want and what you don’t want. Bill Adkins, the campus director at CodeCraft, a Web-development school and coding boot camp says that before hiring a designer, a company needs to make “a list of websites you like and admire and why you like them.” This is to help your designer understands your brand and goals.

This is also to help designers understand what you need of them and of the website. Do you want to update your content regularly? Does it need to be fresh and youthful or corporate and formal? Do you need a designer that also has content writing skills?

Once you have listed down what you want, it is easier to find a candidate that suits all your needs.

 

• Check out their experience and portfolio

 

Checking out their portfolio will give you an insight to past client’s webpage designs and to identify if their vision and designs matches your company’s vision. It will be easier to work with a designer that already has experience designing a website with the elements that you want rather than someone who has an absolute different concept from yours.

Another important experience to check for is their CMS experience. “If you haven’t chosen a CMS yet, find a firm that can support you in the decision making process on what CMS makes the most sense for your business and your goals,” says Patrick Biddiscombe, CEO of New Breed Marketing.

 

• Ask for their references

 

References not only allow you to check out a designer’s past designs but it also enables you to understand the relationship between the designer and the client and the extend of the job being done. If their past clients are willing to vouch for them than you can be sure that it will be easy to work with.

Another way to do it is to ask for referrals from people you trust. “Referrals from business associates whose websites you admire are your best source,” states Lynn Amos, principal at Fyne Lyne Ventures, a Web design firmin New York.

“A good partner marketplace will have a variety of agencies to review, complete with examples of previous work, expected budget ranges and the industries they specialize in,” says Russell Griffin, senior director of design and solutions partner program, Bigcommerce. This plus getting recommendations from your peers ensures you that the designers has a good record.

 

• Experiences in SEO and SEM

 

You don’t only want your website to exist, you also want it to work for you. A great web designer knows that design has to compliment SEO well. You want to ensure that your webpage is on top of the search results for Google and Yahoo and you need a designer who knows how to ensure that, or at least, suggest it.

Experience in SEM on the other hand would enable a designer to help you design a website that would cater to your company’s need, whether it is a user-friendly page, or the list of contents suitable for your business optimisation.

 

• Maintenance and quality of services

 

A website would require regular maintenance. Hence before you hire a designer, ask what their long term planning is. If a designer maintains a good relationship with their clients, you can be sure that they will help with your future content, progress checking and even brainstorm some creative ideas to keep your website relevant. Website maintenance begins with different web designs that will in future cater to different digital marketing strategies.

Ask if they offer you a package to help maintain your website once a month or every three months. Maintaining a website might cost slightly more but it is better to pay for it rather than hiring a team to repair for a hacked website, or worst, re-doing the entire website.

It would be better if they have their own web development team. This way, even if the designer is not experienced in Social Media Marketing, for example, they will have a team to advise them on it, saving you time and money in the long run.

• Platform testing

Okay you have a great website, now what? Do you launch it straight away?

There is nothing more frustrating than thinking that you have a great web page up and running, only to realise that it doesn’t work well on your user’s end or to realise it doesn’t work for you. Always ask the agency/designer how they go about testing web platforms before calling it a job well done and launching it.

 

We hope this article helps you to narrow down your best choice of web designer. For more information, please visit ThunderQuote.

ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.