Building web design services from scratch? Renewing an existing design? Either way, there are many factors you’ll need to do before getting started. Here are 5 tips for hiring a great web designer.
1. Own, not rent, your website
Before starting your website project, get cleared on the difference between renting and owning your website. Custom themes from SquareSpace and ElegantThemes are attractive but they ask you to pay a rent monthly or yearly. For custom-designed websites, you should own full rights once your design is completed and paid for.
When evaluating web design services quotes, carefully read the proposal. Will full control of the domain name, hosting environment, and source code are given from the web designer to you?
2. Check out their portfolio
Take a few of the web design services provider’s samples and visit their websites. Do you approve of what you see? Don’t just ooh and ahh over pretty designs – go past the home page and click through every page to check their functioning, site structure, and user experience. Look for clean ideas and intuitive navigations. The quality of effort they put into their past projects will likely reflect the result of your web design services project.
3. Inquire about SEO
A well-optimized website will keep you on google’s radar. Talk to your web design services candidates about their SEO expertise. If they make huge promises about first-page ranking, that’s a huge red flag and you should walk away. If they talk of how proper indexing, coding, and other site-wide ways can increase search bot accessibility and page speed, you’re good to go.
4. Make sure you mesh well
When hiring web designers, schedule at least one in-person or virtual meeting with each company and have a chat with them face to face. How they respond to your questions now will converse about how they’ll be to work with when the web designing is in full speed. Do they ask a lot of quires and seem excited about your project? Assess their answers to your interview questions to decide if they’re the best web design services for you.
5. Think about the long term
Once development is finished, web design services require routine maintenance and support work on the back end to maintain running optimally. Performing upgrades, securely backing up files, clearing cache, removing old plugins…the list goes on. Who will handle these technical tasks?
