We have seen and heard plenty of instances of a website becoming a headache for businesses from poor designers. Here is a checklist on how can you make safe guard your website investment!
- Business Website: How does their business website look? If their website isn't professional how can they deliver a quality website for you. Does it suit their services and convey their business in a effective manner?
- Understanding: Are they understanding your business needs? Alot of companies push a website as a product usually a template. Instead they should be understanding your business needs and conveying that through your website thoroughly.
- Portfolio: Checking the portfolio is important in seeing the jobs they have completed. Do they look professional and meet the needs of that particular website? Sometimes the websites can be in different price ranges so it's important to ask how much would a quality of that particular site cost.
- Contracts: Contracts are written up to protect your best interests and the web design companies. It binds a commitment for developing a professional website which is necessary to protect you as the client.
- Not freelancers: Generally freelancers lack the professional skills which can be clearly seen in their designs, there are exceptions though.
- Experience: How long have they been designing is an important factor. What is most important is their level of experience, what we have found is there are many out dated design companies with loads of experience but poor experience. The best way is to judge by the quality of their work.
- Validated DIV XHTML / CSS: Do they validate their webpages in XHTML to meet w3c standards? Are they following best practice using CSS for all styling of the website? Traditionally websites were developed in tables these days they should be structured in "div tags" which many companies just don't seem to grasp.
- SEO: Are the webpages programmed to maximise SEO? Do they offer SEO with the website and find out what they cover because SEO can be small or it can be extensive.
