The ever-increasing popularity of the World Wide Web is causing more and more businesses to invest in a good website to make most of the wide-reaching exposure that this marketing medium provides, at very affordable rates. The purpose of a website is very similar to that of an advertising campaign – increase sales and improve the value-perception among current and prospective customers. In order to ensure that a website accomplishes these goals, it is essential that it is pleasant in appearance and professional in its demeanor besides being easy to use and rich in information. It is needless to say that you will need to hire nothing short of the experts if your website must possess these attractive qualities. A professional web design company provides complete web solutions that effectively satisfy your goals and maximize your returns on investments.
The Art of Web Site Design
When it comes to website development, the color pallets, resolutions, sizes and layouts are all important and it takes a skilled website designer to make the most of different operating systems and browsers versions that the website may be viewed upon. Constructing the web page code is more of an art which comes only with true skill, knowledge and experience to accomplish this. Besides looking attractive, the web page must also be coded properly to load quickly on different browsers and operating systems and more importantly, to be indexed well by search engines.
A word of caution here: There is a general trend amongst graphic designers (who specialize in the realm of print media) to consider themselves to be qualified enough to indulge in web designing and don’t see the need to update themselves on the specialized areas that are an integral part of the same. This in particular can have rather disastrous results since there is a huge difference between graphic design and web design – while print media is heavily graphics-oriented, websites need to be more focused on the content and the layout of the contents. It is therefore all the more important to choose the web designer for your website prudently.
Choosing the Right Web Design Experts
Before zeroing in on a web site development company, it is important that you know the various skill sets possessed by the company so as to be able to determine whether it provides all the services related to web page design that you are likely to require. Some of the basic web-designing services include flash or graphic designing, shopping cart, e-commerce application development, dynamic website, Search Engine Optimization and SEO oriented copywriting. It is advisable that the same company providing web site design services also undertake and search engine optimization services since it is usually essential to alter the website to be able to achieve a better search engine ranking.
While there are several ways to go about looking for a web development company that you can safely rely on for your business’ web site design, a combination of these different approaches is usually the best method of finding a web site design company that will suit your requirements.
Top 5 ‘Must-haves’ in a Web Design Company
Here are some aspects that will help you be reasonably sure of the caliber of website design talent that you are hiring:
- Samples of past work / portfolio: While it is good to be encouraging to rookies, it may not be the best occasion to go about doing so – not with your website at stake! Always check for examples of past work; if they are unable to do so, they must be ready to create a sample for you – this way you can be sure of what they are capable of. It must be ascertained that they are amply skilled to produce work that is in line with your requirement. Here are some of the qualities that their work must possess:
- Clean and professional appearance
- Effective layout
- Easy navigationAs long as their portfolio / samples look appealing to you, you can safely move on to the next screening steps.
- Mode of web site update: Your website will require to be updated from time to time and for this reason, this aspect must be clarified well in advance. If you need to pay the web site designer every time you want to update content on the website, it will work out to be more expensive besides making it a tedious affair. It is hence advisable that you make a provision to update the website yourself using some sort of a control panel type interface or else a Content Management System (CMS) that will allow you to make changes to the website content.
- Technology used: A good web site developer must be confident of his skills and experience dealing with the modern HTML and cascading style sheet (CSS) techniques which are critical to a professional, modern web design. A simple way of ensuring that they know their job is to ask them how they go about generating the web page code – if they rely on some sort of a software package to do it, they probably are not very proficient with the basics of web site design.
- Specific web site design requirements: The construction of your website depends largely on the purpose of creating the same. For instance, interactive website may require Flash programming while an e-commerce website will need shopping-cart and accounting functionalities. When you discuss your project with your prospective web design company, they must seem confident enough to deliver your specific requirement. A functional and effective website usually has a talented web design expert who specializes in creating dynamic websites backing it up.
- Web site performance: Web page load time and search engine indexing are vital factors that affect a web site’s performance and can be accomplished using intelligent design techniques. A web site’s indexing is hugely dependant on good web page code that will in turn maximize the website’s content for search engine indexing. Improper HTML coding techniques or including too many graphics are some of the causes of slow loading websites. Simply look at the amount of time it takes to load web pages that have been created by your prospective web designer – if the samples take long to load, chances are that they don’t have a good grasp of their job!
Over and above these vital aspects, as long as there is a team of professionals who are committed to delivering your exact requirement and over-achieving expectations with sheer hard work and diligence, there’s no stopping your extremely successful website from wiping out competition!