Choosing the Right Designer

It is important that you choose your web designer carefully. Do your family and friends a favour. If you don't want your website designed and coded properly, don't commission a web designer to do it. Everyone has a computer literate teen somewhere in their family that would be more than happy with £50 for putting a site together using automatic functions in a drag and drop web design program such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. If a company is claiming that they have the edge because of their cutting edge software, it is really the opposite to the truth. Why pay someone £400 to use a drag and drop program when you could spend less on the program itself and give it to a family member and let them do it for you, or do it yourself if you have the time? Hand coding is the best and most efficient way of producing websites, however, some programs can be helpful to speed up some commonly used functions.

If you are serious and want your site to be legal, professional, clean, valid, easy to navigate and search engine friendly, then you will need to look carefully for a real web designer. Here is a short checklist of what to look for and what you should expect from a proper web design company. It is easy for anyone to talk technical computer jargon that the average business owner won't understand and realise is all complete rubbish to pump up the price.

Web Design Checklist

Portfolio:

Obviously you will want to see the portfolio of the designer to see what the quality of their work is really like. This will be your main source of information.

Aesthetically Pleasing:

This goes without saying really. If the sites in the portfolio are ugly, then chances are yours will be too.

Valid Code:

A modern day web designer should be conforming to web standards outlined by W3C which ensures an easy to maintain site, eliminates the chances of prosecution for disability discrimination, fast page loading and better search engine results. You can check any webpage to see if it passes validation by going to validator.w3.org and simply typing the address of the page you want to check. You can do the same for the css code at jigsaw.w3.org.

Table Based Layouts:

Tables are to be used for table data only, yet people are still using them to layout their entire website. This increases page load times, makes maintenance a nightmare and is not semantically correct. You can check to see if a site has used tables for layout by viewing the source code. PC users can right click on any web page and select "view source". If the code is full of <tr>, <td>, <table> tags etc... it should look very complicated and is obviously a table based layout. If it is heavily dominated with <div>,<p> and <li> tags etc..., chances are it will be much easier for you to follow and will be a css based layout.

CSS Based Layout:

Your site should separate layout from content. This is done by using css (cascading style sheets). These files hold all the information about how your site is laid out, what fonts and colours are used etc... The web page source code should be the actual text and image content and the <div> tags that hold it all together.

Cross Browser Compatibility:

You might be looking at this site on Internet Explorer 7, or you might be using Firefox, or Netscape, or maybe you or your potential customers don't update their computer software very often and are using Internet Explorer 5.5. If a site is not coded with this in mind it will be a nasty mess to a lot of people. Some "designers" might code a site and assume because it looks good in IE 7 the job's done. This is not the case. Every browser renders websites differently but we can't make everyone switch to using Firefox overnight so there will be millions of people still using different web browsers for a very long time. Unless you have access to a few computers with different versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers, you will have to take the designers word for it that they test in various browsers. But make sure you bring up this subject before you pay out.

SEO:

A lot of designers claim to do Search Engine Optimization. Do they rank highly in the search engines themselves? As a web design site, probably not since there are so many. Check their portfolio and then try and find that site in a search engine by typing a term that relates to the site. If it isn't on the first 10 pages then something isn't right. Do they say "we have all the latest SEO software for submitting your site to millions of search engines"? If so, don't bother. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Msn are what matter and they are extremely clever. Programs that submit to loads of search engines on a regular basis can actually cause you more harm than good. A search engine lists your site with relevancy to content, not how often it has been submitted to them. There is no way to fool the search engines using programs or techniques. If there is, they find out before it matters and resolve the bug. Chances are, the developers at google are much more knowledgable than the person that is going to develop your site. And they definately know more about how SEO works. Bottom line is, a good designer will advise you on wording your content so that you target the search phrases used by potential customers. Valid, semantic code is a very good start for SEO.

Contact Information:

Technical talk aside, you really need to make sure you have a contact telephone number for your designer. You don't want to have to rely on email. If you need to contact your designer quickly, it will be no good sending an email that might only be checked every few days and then finding you want them to elaborate on their response and you have to wait another few days. Email is a fantastic leap for communication, but nothing is more efficient than telephone or face to face conversation and using email for sending text content or images when required.

There are a lot of other factors to consider when tracking down the right designer for your website but this shoud give you a good start with the most important factors.