A beautiful and eye-catchy website can help your business to reach new heights. You need to find the right web Design Company if you are looking for a new website design from scratch or want to upgrade the existing website. There are several web design companies with different skill sets and expertise. But you need to be very selective in choosing the right web design company. While selecting the web design & development company you need to learn the marks of a good agency partner. Without this knowledge, you risk choosing the wrong agency and that might be a catastrophic waste of time and money. So, it is important for you to understand these important criteria to protect you and your business from this potential error. So, in this post, I am going to list the top 10 wonderful tips that you can use while selecting the website design company.
Get their portfolio: Have a look at their portfolio. You may also ask them for samples of relevant work. For instance: if you are looking for an eCommerce website, you can ask them for an eCommerce website that they have built in the past. Evaluate the portfolio and make the correct decision.
Bonus advice: Don’t trust the homepages screenshots. Ask them to show the website that is in action. And visit that website in reality. If you don’t like anything from there, then it won’t be a good choice.
Ask about fees: you have one more piece of financial business on your side even after you have asked the agency for pricing. An organization sometimes has a list of fees that they request, and they don’t always tell you about it. These charges may be in your contract’s fine print or they may not mention charges anywhere. But if you are partnering with an agency without asking for surprise fees, you might quickly find yourself over-budgeting with the website that you don’t like. With this mind, you need to discuss their policy on fees. Are they charging for making unplanned updates on the website? Do they charge you for the extra hours they spend each month on your company’s website? All these questions are good to ask, particularly because website design companies do not have a “normal” role on fees. It’s up to you to get the details you need to be successful, especially if they don’t come upfront. Once you have finances in order, you will move on to the next step of the company assessment.
Be clear about your requirements: It’s a good idea to send your project requirements to a couple of web designing companies and ask them for a proposal. It allows you to compare the deliverables and skillsets. You’re an industry expert and you know what you’re selling. So, it makes sense that you’re much familiar with what you want and how you want.
Check out reviews: Before finalizing the best web designing company for your website or a project, it is important to do your homework. Check the comments and suggestions on their blog, or ask them directly about any other recommendations. You can also have a friendly talk with the previous clients of the company and ask them to share their feedback. Have the plans been delivered on time? How was their help? Are they friendly with the client?
Know your budget: Before looking for a good website design company, it is important to set a budget for your project. This budget can be anything from shoestring to unlimited funding but before pursuing agencies, you should have a number on a paper. Besides, you should set your budget’s flexibility to ensure that you can accommodate up selling. You will be willing to pay less than your budget to get what you need, but an agency may recommend you buying other web design options to achieve more success. While the agency has a financial incentive to do that, they are the experts in their field as well – they know what’s going to work for you.
Lastly, you should have a number on your paper to tell your agency. This number should be lower than your actual budget to give you some flexibility when you are preparing what you want from an agency. You can easily accommodate their recommendations without breaking your bank account if you give them a slightly lower than average amount somewhere from 75% to 95% of your actual budget.
Analyze how they communicate: Communication is the key to creating a good website. You should be able to explain your needs and expectations to your web designer. And do they understand your needs or not? What is their answer? If they look little confusing about your project, try to explain them again, and if it is still going on, drop the idea of giving them the project.
Ask who will be responsible for your website personally: you don’t want them to say that they are responsible for your success as a whole when you’re working with an agency. That mentality reflects a culture that is undefined, loose, and undisciplined, that can continually let you down. Instead, you want a representative who is personally responsible for seeing that your website gets the attention that it needs to thrive. You should have one contact point, which can answer your queries, review your progress periodically, and make changes to your current strategy, if necessary. If you do not have such contact, the agency can blame among its employees and make excuses for why you don’t achieve your goals. But when you have a single person for your satisfaction, there is no doubt about who is responsible- you have got their name on your phone.
Find out if they’ll relocate your website: In some instances, the current hosting service may not be used by a website designing company. Instead, they can host it on their own or transfer it to another business they have contracted as an exclusive provider. If your site is to be moved to another host, you need to know of this. You don’t want to risk trying out your website just to find out that it’s hosted somewhere else under a different username and password. When you’re out of the loop, without your oversight, an organization can do anything they want to do to your site — and that can be a disaster recipe.
Responsive web design: A responsive website is not a trend these days, it’s just the best way to create a website. If a web design agency is unfamiliar with responsive designs or suggests that a separate mobile website is a better option, then they are wrong. Okay, separate mobile websites have some benefits but the typically responsive layout is a preferred solution.
Set deadlines for clear, achievable requirements: lastly, you need to set clear, achievable criteria with deadlines after you have gone through all of the previous steps. This form of planning and roadmap gives you a way to track your website design agency’s progress. If your partner is ahead of the schedule, it means you have chosen a good partner. And if they lag, you may want to think about speaking to another company.
Concrete criteria include qualities such as whether your website will be accessible on mobile platforms or not, how many visitors you would like to support at a time when your website will be launched, a regular maintenance schedule, and more.
As a rule of thumb, if you are more specific about what you want to achieve, you will be more successful.
Final thoughts: You can now make a good choice for a web design partner for your company with all this knowledge at your fingertips. Go find the best solution for your needs and make sure all the issues and concerns you have are working for you. And if you think about other questions you want to ask, ask them at all times — a good website design agency will never turn away your questions or give you vague answers.