How to choose a website designer - tips and advice on paying for web site design
Web Space - Bandwidth - Packages - Extras - Updates - Search Engines - Build Quality
So you have decided that you want a website to promote your business or club on the internet but you dont know where to start when it comes to choosing the best web design company for the job. You have decided that the cheap, "DIY website" options just arent good enough for a professional, quality looking business and you need the services of an experienced web designer to create a quality site.
We will assume that you have checked out the designers portfolio of completed work and you like what you see. The sites look good and appear to be of a decent standard.
The next thing to compare when looking at web design companies are the facilities they offer such as web hosting, bandwidth and server space, and how much this will cost you. Lets first look at what those terms mean and why you should care about them.
Web Space
Most web designers also offer to host your finished site and provide the storage space on-line, (web space). Basically, web space is the same as the hard drive on your home computer. The more photographs, documents and files that you save onto your hard drive at home, the more space you end up using.
A website is stored on a hard drive just like yours, but this one is open for everyone on-line to access so that they can see your site. This web site dedicated hard drive is called a web server, and you will pay for space on this web server to store your site.
The important factors for you are how much web space do you get, is this enough for your web site, and how much does it cost?
A small, web site with 5 or 6 pages, a few images and a contact page will be unlikely to need more than 10mb of web space at the most. A lot of web hosts offer huge amounts of webspace that may at first look attractive, until you consider why you are paying for 500mb or webspace that you may never use.
If however, you want to run an e-commerce site with lots of products, and you expect to increase your product range over time, you may well need upwards of 200mb to store all the products images, customer orders and such.
Bandwidth
Almost all hosting packages also come with a set amount of bandwdth per month, so whats bandwidth?
Each time a visitor comes to your site, all the images and text on the site is downloaded to their computer. If your whole site is 1 megabyte in size, (1mb), and 10 people view your whole site in a day, you will have used up 10 mb of bandwidth.
Web hosts usually offer a minimum of 1 gigabyte (1gb) of bandwidth per month, (which is 1000 mb), for a set yearly price. This is a fairly generous amount and will be more than enough for most websites, but have a look around at what the various companies are charging for that 1gb. If you are running a commerce site, you will quickly find that as your custom increases, so does your bandwidth usage. How much will it cost for an extra 1gb of bandwidth per month to cover your increased visitor numbers? Will you be billed as soon as your bandwidth goes over the set limits? If so, by how much?
A good web designer will take care when building your site to make sure that it uses the minimum amount of bandwidth possible so as not to cause you undue costs.
The Package
Bandwidth and webspace are usually bundled together as a package and are renewable on a monthly or yearly basis. Monthy deals tend to be more expensive in the long run, but yearly hosting ties you into the hosting package for 12 months. Decide for yourself what best suits your business. If you are running an e-commerce package, do you have to pay a commission or percentage to the host / designer on each sale, or does his financial involvement end once you have paid for your site design and hosting package?
Many of the cheaper, "DIY websites" work out a lot cheaper to get up and running than a custom designed site from a designer, but you may have a nasty shock when it comes to renewing your package each year, and counting the cost of their slice of your web sales.
Extras
What extras come with your web design package? Do you get a statistics package to help you monitor how many visitors you are getting and where they are coming from? Do you get free email facilities so that you can have a professional looking email address to match your site address? Can you access this mail on-line through a web mail panel? Do you get a free web site address, (also called a domain name or URL), or do you have to buy this separately?
Updates
If your web designer has done a good job on the original design, you wont need much in the way of updates for your site. However, its worth asking about costs for simple things like changing the telephone numbers on your site, updating the contact details, or adding an extra page or two. All designers will charge a fee for alterations to a site after it has been signed off as complete, but you need to clear up just how much it will cost, and work out how often you expect to need those changes.
Search Engine Optimization
For your site to succeed, you will need to attract visitors, and the best way to do that is by a good position in the search engine results on the likes of google. A good designer will have this in mind from the ground up when creating your site, but it still takes a bit of work once a site is up and running to fine tune things to boost your ranking.
Does your designer offer support for at least the first 3 months to get your site performing well on the search engines, along with the stats package to help you analyse how well you are doing? Does he guarantee a top place listing? If he does - run a mile as no honest web designer would ever make such a guarantee - but he ought to promise that every effort will be made to ensure maximum exposure.
Build Quality
Whilst there isnt a universally recongnised industry standard for web site creation, there is a generally accepted standard as laid down by the respected World Wide Web Consortium, (W3c). It may not always be possible to adhere to the standards set by the W3c, particularly when ceating shopping cart style e-comerce sites, it should be the aim of any good web designer to try to achieve W3c validation whenever possible. A site that is written to the highest industry standards will usually cary a link to the W3c or a small graphic like the one at the bottom of this page which takes a visitor to the W3c verification service to prove that it is up to standard.
Following thse guidelines doesn't just mean that the programming behind the site is up to standard, it also helps towards ensuring that a site meets basic accessibility standards too. This means people with disabilities who need to use screen readers to access a site, cant use a mouse or keyboard, or need to enlarge text or reduce colours and contrast can do so. It can be likened to the internet equivalent of providing disabled access to a bulding, and in fact, web sites are now subject to the Disability Discrimination act too.
Payment for your site
You wouldnt pay for a car without knowing what colour, or even what make or engine size it was in advance. The nature of web deign means that you cant have a totally clear idea of what the site will look like before its finished, so a decent web designer wont expect you to pay in full beofre he starts work on your project. Common practice is for a designer to ask for 30% of the total cost before he starts work on the site, with 70% on completion, but you may get a even better deal if you look around.
A free demo or mock up of at least part of the site will reassure you and the designer that you are both thinking along the same lines before you both comit to a project. Even better for the buyer is a designer who wont accept any payment until the site is completed and you sign off to say you are happy with it. The designer is taking a risk that you wont just lose interest before the project is finshed and he has wasted his time and money.
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Examples
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