How To Choose A Web Design Company
These days a website is not an indulgence any more, but an absolute necessity. Your website is your image that you show to the world. Even the most humdrum business run from a garage can present a professional image and project a first-class company to the world. In other words, if you want to be seen as a expert company you need to make sure that your website projects that image.
In the same way that sales people of a big department store or a business selling B2B (business to business) products and services should always be personable and attractive, your website should be of equally high standards since your website creates the first impression of your company.
The time and cost that you lavish on your web design is therefore important. It is not to say that you should pay an overrated, overpriced advertising company thousands or millions to design your site, but on the other hand, please do not leave the job in the hands of your 15 year old nephew who has been building PCs since he was barely out of his nappies. Being ‘good with computers’ does not necessarily equate to ‘being able to design a good website’.
So where do you find good website design companies? Trawling the Internet does help, obviously, but here are a couple of essential tips:
- Speak to someone in the company in person. Does the person that you speak to know what he is talking about or is he merely the salesman?
- If possible, visit them. What do their offices look like, is it a one man operation or are there other staff on board? Remember, a one-man show is all very well but you need to be sure that there is backup in case the one man gets very busy, goes on holiday or is run over by a bus!
- And lastly, but not least – look at their portfolio. Do you like the look of the websites that they have designed? Is there a wide enough variety in the type of websites that they build? If their sites all look the same there is a big chance that they have their own internal templates that they just cut and paste from – nothing wrong with that in principle since it improves the web development time, but that does mean that they might lack in enough expertise to manage something more complex.