Choosing a web designer

Choosing and working with a web designer could make or break your business – it might sound a bit dramatic, but as a smaller business, your website is probably going to be the first thing that a potential customer sees - get it right and it should bring in new customers and improve your brand, get it wrong and it could be a costly mistake.

A good web designer should be able to work with you to develop a website that truly reflects what your business does and how it ‘feels’.  It’s very easy to design a ‘generic’ website - there are thousands of templates out there for very little money that are very nicely designed, but they don’t reflect the personality of your company - using a good web designer will be different.

Who you work with can make a big difference to the end product.  The first thing you need to do is plenty of research.  There are many web design companies out there, large and small.  Some are very good, some are very bad and most are somewhere in between.  Look at their website, take a look at their portfolio and narrow your options down to three or four.  Contact them and have a chat – don’t go into too much detail, just let them tell you about what they do and how they do it. Make sure you get some contact details for past clients, you should be talking to them to see how things went.

By now, you should have a good idea who you feel most comfortable with and what they can do.  The next stage is to write down what you need from your website.  The important thing is not to say how it should be done, just what it needs to do – this is where a good designer can make a big difference.  Something like ‘customers should be able to get in touch easily’ or ‘somewhere to showcase my design work’ are much better than ‘there should be a small contact form at the bottom right of every page’ or ‘I want an animated banner 600 pixels wide at the top of each page’ – let the designer be creative in developing a solution, that’s what you’re paying them for.

Take your requirements and give them to your shortlisted companies and ask them how they’d propose to deliver what you want and how much it will cost. You should now have three or four comparable quotes, a good idea of what the site will do and how it will look. Now you’ve just got to make the decision....