Posts Tagged ‘relationships’

When you decide to have a website built, it’s important to make sure you choose your designer carefully. By choosing the first designer you meet, or, even worse, because they’re cheap, you could be putting your future website at risk. So, here are a few recommended questions to ask potential web designers to make sure you choose the right one for you.

1. ‘Can I see examples of your work?’ This is possibly the most important step to take, as straight away seeing examples of previous work can help establish their overall style and quality of finish. Be sure to contact a few of these people to ensure that the designer really DID design the sites in question!

2. ‘Which sectors have you designed for?’ This question helps to establish whether or not their experience will match your company’s industry. Whilst not crucial for the designer to have created an exact website before, it helps if they have some experience of your company’s industry.

3. ‘What are pricing structures/ how much will it cost’? It is important to ask what they charge for typical website packages (e.g. 5 page website costs £x, with extra pages costing £x each). Find out exactly what is included in price, and whether they charge more for text, graphics, shopping carts etc. Better to know up front than to be surprised with a bill for ‘extras’ at the end.

4. ‘Will my website be maintained?’ Find out whether or not the website designer can maintain your website after completion, make changes, and what their fee would be. If you know it is likely that your website will need regular maintenance and changes, establish how much they charge for this as regular updates may dramatically affect your overall budget.

5. ‘What do you need from us?’ Some designers may prefer having a lot of design input to help build the website, some may prefer none at all, so if you have a specific design idea, it’s important to establish whether the designer would be willing to work with your ideas. They may also ask you to provide text, images, and examples of websites you like as a starting point for your own website.

Asking relevant questions such as these can help to ensure that, whichever web designer you choose, you know that what they offer, what they charge, and overall, whether they are the right designer for you.

What other questions did you ask your web designer?

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photo credit: o5com

Before deciding on the right web designer for you, you firstly need to establish what you want out of a website designer. Do you want someone to just build a website, or do you want to someone that is going to help drive your website forward, and help boost your online presence?

If you decide on the latter, then you need to make sure that you choose a designer that is willing to be in it for the long haul. By choosing a designer who isn’t experienced in, or willing to, drive your website forward, then it could mean a lot of wasted money.

It is entirely possible that, by choosing a web designer from an online marketing background, your website will benefit from achieving a higher online presence and better visitor usability. This kind of designer will also often have experience in working with on-going clients, so you know that, should changes need to be made after the website is completed, they can fit these into their busy schedule.

If you’re not quite sure whether or not a website designer has the right attention span you desire, try and gauge from your first meeting how they interact with you. Some website designers have notoriously short attention spans, so if this becomes apparent in your first meeting, this could prove detrimental later on. If they ask a lot of questions about design and future care, then straight away you can tell they are considering the future maintenance of your website.

Even if you are not planning on your website to need regular updates or changes, it is worth checking with your web designer whether or not they would be able to make these amendments. If you are planning on these changes, such as the addition of regular blogs, extra product listings etc, then it may be worth trying to work these into your pricing plan to ensure they can fit these into their schedule.

Never be afraid to ask your potential web designer questions, lots of questions. Web design consultancy is a very important part of creating the perfect website for you, and if this includes future maintenance, then it is important to establish as soon as possible whether your web designer is in it for the long haul.

At Divadani Design, we develop relationships with our clients that last long beyond the website design – we not only maintain and update websites frequently, we help with SEO, promotion, Social media and more to ensure that your website is something that works for you, not something you’re just left with.

Is YOUR web designer in it for the long haul?