Website designers are plentiful, which makes sense in an economic landscape that relies on online marketing and sales. As the client, at best you know enough about website design to engage in detailed conversation with your designer about the elements and plugins your website needs. At worst you just figure your business needs a website in order to thrive. Be confident that the website designer you hire comes equipped with high-quality design skills and integrity. Here are the top traits you want to ensure your designer has during your consultation.
Marketing Knowledge:
Your website design team should include a marketer. If you hire a team of one, they still have to understand how to make sure your website is SEO compatible and user-friendly. They have to have intimate knowledge of what makes a website a successful business tool and rather than just functional.
Realistic Timing and Price:
Most of the time, you get what you pay for with website design, but it’s beneficial to get a few quotes from different designers to be sure that you’re not being taken advantage of with a price tag either too high or too low. Additionally, a quality designer knows how long it’s going to take to build your website as well as how much time needs to be added to that timeline to include any changes you want to make. They can build it in a few weeks, but you’ll need longer than that to sit on preliminary designs to decide what you really want to spend money on. Be sure that there’s an option for you to blow up the whole design and request a do-over. Hint: It’ll be early on in the timeline, so pay attention or risk paying more money. Expect a price starting at $2000 and a timeline of 2 to 6 months depending on the complexity of the website.
They want you closely involved in the process: It’s your website, and while your website designer knows what they like and what works for their business, they also know that you need a custom design that befits you and your business and that the best person to weigh in on that is you. You should be asked to provide detailed input at every stage of the build. “Just trust me” isn’t what you want to hear. You want to hear their professional input and benefit from their experience, but at the end of the project, this is going to be all yours.
User-friendly programming: You own this website at the end of the day and you want to be able to update it yourself – or possibly hire out the job to another company should your original designer become unavailable, or simply because you paid for this website! Even if you are not tech savvy whatsoever, you deserve to have the right to choose who can add content to your website, or update the features when necessary. And those updates will be critical in just a few years, if not months; online technology changes for the better constantly. The last thing you need is to have to rely on one designer and their schedule to make changes. It’s yours! Read your contract.
Jelly Triangle combines marketing expertise with high-quality website design to provide our customers with their dream website. Call 519-624-8888 to book your complimentary consultation.