Web Design & Web Development Blog

Or why it’s maybe not best to hire your brothers friend after all

It’s going to begin by reviewing their portfolio, but even their portfolio is not going to tell you about all the bad designs, or designs that were never properly completed. Simply asking them is unlikely to get you a real answer either.

When hiring a custom site designer, call around and ask a half-dozen website designers in your area. If you find prices from other companies that simply don’t fit in, be cautious. The ol’ adage still applies “If it’s too good to be true….”

You may even find a friend or a student willing to try it out. These sometimes work out, but truth is, you will have no real assurance that they really know what they are doing if your site’s goal is to drive business, sales, reputation, etc… This is much more true when dealing with anything beyond an informational, or brochure type of site; but even a great brochure site needs to have a purpose, unless you need it just to make you feel good about yourself. Which ones of these apply to your informational site?

• create awareness
• capture interest
• fuel desire for prospective new business
• generate qualified leads
• be marketable through channels such as search engines
• educate
• maintain contact with and inform current clients
• be easy and affordable to maintain after its complete
• be engaging

Here are a few real-world examples:

1. For example, there was a company that had an informational site with the ultimate goal of using the store locater feature. After a complete overhaul, this goal (or sometimes referred to as “conversion rate”) increased by 50 times. I am sure they had a lot more business as a result at their brick-and-mortar store fronts.
2. I have seen sites built beautifully using Flash (usually un-beknownst to the site owner) but they were practically impossible to rank in the search engines the way they wanted to; nor could they simply hire another site designer to ever edit it for them since they did not have the original Flash files. This is really bad if you need to switch designers as it may force a complete redesign.
3. I am not a trained as a custom site designer, and I built a site once for a family member. After a redesign later on, the conversion rate, and therefore sales, tripled. Yet more proof that hiring a great custom site designer can really help an online business.

In my next post, I will cover some of the questions you should ask when trying to find a potential custom web designer