Choosing a web design company to build you a better website is not as easy as it seems. But with the right information, it is possible for you to get a near excellent website which will make your company stand out among its competitors. The focus of this post, therefore, is to provide you and your company with an ultimate guide on how to get the best web design services.
Having a good website does not only project the great image of your brand, but it also assures your clients of your professionalism and how dedicated you are to what you do. The key to achieving this is choosing a good web design company that will design an incredible website for you.
But how do I choose a web design company, one might ask. Well, choosing a web design company can only become a reality for us if we make thorough research and inquiries about our potential web design agency. This is especially because there are thousands of web design companies who claim to be competent, but they might be incapable of producing the best website design services.
Web Design Companies
Before we move on to talk about how to choose a good web design company, we first need to understand the roles of web design companies. Website design companies are companies that focus on the aesthetic and usability aspect of a website. Primarily, their focus is to ensure that your website can be fully accessed and has all the essential elements to give it an aesthetic look.
It must be noted that web design companies are slightly different from web development companies, as the latter usually focuses on the functional aspect of a website. We can thus think of web developers as those who lay the foundation while web designers work on the architectural aspect of a website.
In relation to function, it is the responsibility of a web design company to ensure that the websites they build for their clients have an effective navigation menu, balanced color, and a level of consistency with pages. The web design organization also needs to ensure that the website of the client has a mobile-friendly interface to be accessible on mobile phones and tablets.
Some web design companies even go beyond the outlined responsibilities. There are some of them who work hand in hand to ensure that their clients get the best hosting services and sometimes manage their website content for them. In the subsequent paragraphs, I will outline some of the factors to consider when choosing a web design company.
Tips for Choosing a Web Design Company
1. Begin With Your Own Plan
When choosing a web design company, one of the most important steps you need to follow is to make your own plan. You need to be sure of what you want, how you want your website to look like, and how much you are willing to pay for it. Having this basic plan will go a long way to help you find a perfect match for your company.
We can consider the following when creating our own plan.
Identify The Type of Website You Want Along With Your SEO Goals
Identifying the kind of website you want is very important in outlining your plan. It will not only help you convey your needs to your company but will also help you have a fair idea about the cost of designing the kind of website you want. For example, designing an eCommerce website might cost more than compared to designing a news website.
In relation to your SEO goals too, it is imperative to make a clear outline of what you want to achieve. In this aspect of the plan, you can state how intensive you want your SEO campaign to be. If you want a very high SEO ranking right from the start, you might be asked to pay extra fees to help make it a reality, thus leading to an increase in your budget.
Prepare Your Budget
The budget to be prepared will be based on the type of website you want and your SEO goals. But before drawing up your budget, it is advisable to know the average industry charge for your preferred website and the cost involved in achieving your SEO goals. Through this research, we should be able to bring up a good budget.
While drawing up the budget, we should make it more flexible to accommodate certain changes. This is because the budget might be low compared to the pricing of our potential web design. It is thus essential that we over budget and not under budget for the designing of our website.
2. Get to Know Your Potential Web Design Company
Having prepared your own plan in relation to how you want your website to be, your SEO goals, and your budget, it is now time for some extra research. This is the stage where we need to explore and find as many web design companies as possible and decide on one based on the following criteria. This is also an important step involved in choosing a web design company.
Do They Have a Good Website?
It will be strange to hire a fridge repairer who has a spoilt fridge at home. And it is certainly why you would not pick a web design company that does not have a great website itself. It thus follows that the first indication of a good web design company is their ability to create their own website, and most importantly, an aesthetic one.
In relation to this, we can assess the website by looking at the interface of the website. What is your first impression of the website? Is it too colorful? Is the design good enough to attract and sustain visitors?
Finding answers to these questions and more is very important as it provides us with firsthand information of what our potential clients can do.
How Long Have They Been in the Business?
While giving opportunities to startups and new web design companies is not a bad idea, we would want to go in for a more experienced web design company. This is not to say that new companies are not good enough. Of course, the experienced ones started as startups and gained experience over the years.
But as the saying goes, experience is the best teacher and there is a huge probability that a web design company that has been operating for over five years has an advantage over a recently established one. Experienced companies have a wealth of experience in web designing that new companies cannot boast about. In addition, the longevity of a web design company also gives a company more credibility and an assurance that it can deliver.
Who Are Their Past Clients?
Finding a web design company with years of experience is good but it is even better to have one that has a proven record for designing outstanding websites. As a part of our research, we can browse through our potential web design company’s list of past clients. We can further visit clients’ websites and look at them.
When assessing the websites of the past clients, we can apply the same strategy we used in assessing our potential web design company’s website. In doing so, we will be gathering some information on the capabilities of the company.
What Is Their Client Retention Rate?
A web design company might have a tall list of past and credible clients but is not enough a guarantee that they are the perfect match for your company. What could be important is their client retention rate. By Client retention rate, we mean the ability of web design companies to work with their clients for a long time.
Some web design companies might have worked with several companies but might possess a low client retention rate. This could be due to certain mismanagement issues or disagreements that might not be known to you. Therefore, knowing our potential web design company’s client retention rate will help us decide on whether they are good enough for us.
A good web design company will have at least a 70% retention rate indicating that they have a good relationship with their past clients. It is even better to go with one with a 90% client retention rate, with the assurance that it is one of the best.
Make a Budget Comparison
At this stage, we can make initial contact with our potential clients and ask about their prices. The inquiries will just be shallow and should focus on the cost of designing your preferred website and helping you achieve your SEO goals. By so doing, we will have the needed information to compare our estimated budget against the pricing of our potential client.
After making a budget comparison, there might be the possibility of your budget being lower than the money expected of you to pay. In such cases, we need to decide whether it is worth increasing our budget. And we can determine this using the criteria outlined in steps 2A to 2D.
3. Get to know their plan for your website
In step 3 of choosing a web design company, we are moving from a more general level to a specific level. We should have been able to identify about two or three web design companies out of the tall list we created in the second step. Our focus will now be on the three web design companies and we will have to engage them to know the exact package they have for our website.
The following criteria will help us get the best information from our client.
How Will They Help Me Achieve My SEO Goals?
There are probably just a handful of websites that are not concerned by their SEO performance and their rankings on Google. For every website, it is an obsession to have a higher ranking on Google for people to visit the website frequently. And the most efficient way is by optimizing your website to meet SEO standards.
It is thus imperative that our potential client convinces us of what their plans are in terms of improving our SEO score. We could ask questions such as: Which SEO plugin are they going to use and why? How responsive will the website be to increase the SEO rankings?
We can also request evidence backing the fact that they can help us achieve our SEO goals. The evidence could be a link to one of their website clients. This is the first step but it could provide us a clue of whether our potential web design company is the perfect match or not.
Where Will Your Website Be Hosted?
It is very important that we get to know which web hosting organization will be hosting our website for us. Getting to know this is very crucial as it has the power to make or unmake your website. Web hosting services are the ones in charge of providing a server for your website and ensuring that your website is always live.
Just like web design companies, a good web hosting company should also have a proven track record with past clients. It should have experience and should well be known and accepted for the services they offer. We, therefore, have to ask our potential web design companies which web hosting agency will be hosting our service.
If we are not satisfied by the web hosting service, then it is unsafe to go ahead with it. But we can still ask our clients to seek alternatives and present them to us.
Who Will Update Your Website?
They should also be a clear line of agreement between who can update your website. If you are familiar with website dashboards such as of WordPress, then you can take charge of it, but if not your website will have to take charge of it and ensure regular updates.
In the case of the latter, you will have to seek assurances on how regularly your website will be updated. This is key because we do not want our visitors to return every day to meet the same post article or content we posted days ago.
Better still, we can have an agreement with our company that will see us providing the content so they upload it onto the website.
Who Will Oversee Your Website?
At this point, we need to enquire from our potential web design company, who will specifically be assigned to our website. It is good that they provide assurances of supporting us always but we need to insist on knowing the person in charge of our website. If it is possible, we should get the contact of the person.
By doing this, we have a person readily available to listen to our grievances and work on it as soon as possible. The website server might go off sometimes, or a critical error might see the website shutting down and it is imperative that at such points we have someone to respond quickly to it.
What Other Options Are Available?
This step might appear less important but it could be critical as we strive to choose the best web design company. In this step, we find out from our potential web design companies what their backup plans are for our website. We need to make sure that we leave no stone unturned in our bid to choose the best web design company.
Although the company might have provided a satisfactory answer on where our site will be hosted, we need to ask for a backup plan. We need to know where our website will be migrated to in case there is a problem with our current hosting service. The potential web design company should also be able to provide information on how a possible migration might affect the website.
In relation to customer support too, we need to find out from our potential web design company if they can provide another person to be in charge of your website in case the assigned one is unfortunately indisposed.
How Do I Choose a Good Web Design Company?
Having an aesthetic and responsive website is very essential in brand marketing and it is imperative we find the right people to design a website for us. So, although it might appear as a long guide and somehow tedious to follow, it is the ideal guide for us. This guide has outlined the best tips for choosing a web design company and if followed, will help you find the best web design company like UPQODE.
The truth is that there are several web design companies you will come across during your research stage. Some might present very tempting offers but that should not be what compels us to go with them. Instead, their ability to provide us with the best services as outlined in this guide should convince us to go with them.
