If this year has taught us anything it’s that a website is essential for running a business, any kind of business. That website design, however, can make or break your success. In a highly competitive business landscape, website design is a huge factor in what makes your website stand out from the crowd. An effective website takes planning and precision design. From concept to creation your website needs to offer your audience an experience that puts you head and shoulders above the competition. This entails ensuring it has an eye-catching design, an interesting layout, an easy-to-use interface, and offers the best possible user experience. But, to have a website that meets all these design requirements, you have to work with the right web design company.
The process of finding a good web design company can be a challenge since there are so many of them out there. Though the task may seem daunting, you need to be selective and make sure that the company you are considering working with can offer the best solutions while understanding your business and its goals.
Finding the Right Fit – Tips for Choosing a Web Design Company
Whether you are looking to get a new website made or want to revamp your existing one to improve its impact and performance, you need to find a good web design company that’s the right fit for your business. Here are some tips to make this selection process a little easier for you:
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Start With Online Search
Just like with any other important decision in life, use the internet to do a little research on web design companies by using search engines. You need to have multiple options from which to devise a shortlist.
Use a good search engine like Google to check out different websites and blogs that rank and list the best web design agencies. Once you have a list of web design companies, start vetting them out to find the right one for yourself.
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Check Their Websites to Shortlist
Begin the shortlisting process by visiting the websites of all the companies on your list. Since we are dealing with web design companies, their websites should be a good representative of their work. If a web design company’s own website looks outdated, unexciting, and non-engaging, they are not the right people to work with.
How will a company design attractive and engaging websites for its clients when it couldn’t do so for itself? So, simply cut out companies whose websites look bad or boring from your list.
Pro Tip: While reviewing websites, make sure to consider all the key factors that define a good website and not just focus on the layout. You should also consider factors like navigation, user-friendliness, how easy it is to find relevant information on a website, load time, quality of visuals, and the engagement levels of a website. Watch for spelling or grammatical errors. The design of a site may look great, but if it has glaring spelling or grammatical errors it makes the company look sloppy and unprofessional.
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Check Reviews to Shortlist Further
Now that you have shortlisted some of the best-looking companies, it’s time to dig a little deeper to pick the best one. As the saying goes, beauty is only skin deep. So even though a website might look good on the surface, what is the company behind it really like?
One of the best ways to find out if a company’s claims hold water is to see what its customers have to say about it. You will not only learn about the quality of a company’s products and services but also about their professionalism and commitment.
Start with the companies’ own websites. Ideally, every company should have reviews and testimonials from clients on its website. But, the good ones (the ones that are confident of their work) often also provide the clients’ URL, so their prospective customers can see their work in action. If a company doesn’t have testimonials on the website, that’s not a good sign. Contact other businesses that have used the web design company. Are they happy with their website? Has their experience been a positive one? Find out whether they think they got what they were looking for in the web design, or redesign, process.
While it is important to see what information a web design company provides on its website about its previous clients and work, don’t just stop there. Do check out the company’s reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook to gain a better insight into their work, professionalism, behavior, customer support, and overall reliability.
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Look at Their Portfolios to Find Your Top Picks
If you have spent time checking out the reviews of each web design company in your list, you are likely to have a small list of companies that are proficient in their work, according to their clients.
To narrow the list further and pick the top three to five design agencies, you need to check out their portfolio. This will help you determine if they can offer what you are looking for. There may be several web design companies out there that are great at what they do, but not all of them do the kind of work you want. So, take your time to go through their portfolios. Also, do not hesitate to ask them for relevant samples.
Bonus Tip
Don’t fall for screenshots of websites. Ask the design companies to send you functioning URLs of the websites they have designed, and visit them to review the work yourself.
Here are a few things to consider while reviewing the portfolios:
- Are they keeping up with the latest web design trends?
- Are the websites user-friendly, responsive, and mobile-friendly?
- Is their variety in their work or do all their websites look similar? This will tell you how creative their designers are. You don’t want a website that looks similar to a hundred others out there.
Ideally, you should work with a design company that has experience working in your industry. However, do not reject a company solely on this criterion if you love their work. This brings us to our next step.
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Can they produce Value Added Content
A sign of a good web design company is its ability to also produce creative content pieces for your website. This is one of those areas where you can really differentiate yourself from the competition by providing informative, entertaining and compelling content designed to keep customers on your site for longer. This can take the form of a blog, an advertorial, video and audio storytelling and countless other high-level production elements. Do they have a team of writers skilled at communicating effectively and accurately in your language? If you have customers that you’d like to be able to access your site in another language, can your web design company accommodate that?
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Check out their Agency Culture
Ideally, you want a web design company you can work well with. These are the people you will trust with representing your company on the largest platform there is. You need to consider whether the web design company’s values and culture align with your own. Check out their social media profiles, are they engaged with their staff and their audience. Do the people working there look happy? The best web design companies have a list of driving principles and values. Look into whether the web design agency is involved in its community or engages in any charity work.
Ask if you can meet the team that will be involved in developing and designing your website. This doesn’t necessarily have to be in-person, in fact you will want to see that your design team knows how to use modern technology and connect with people across platforms and distance. Often web design companies are in fact a single person who has outsourced elements of the design process. If they hesitate at a request to meet the team, this could indicate that this is perhaps a sole proprietor. You want to choose a company with a diverse team with a depth of experience in a variety of areas who are used to working together, collectively and creatively. Ideally, you’re looking for a web design company with an in-house team of experts.
Shortlist three to five web design companies based on the quality of their work. Now, get in touch with all of them to discuss your needs and goals, and see what they have to offer to you.
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Contact the Shortlisted Companies
Shortlist three to five web design companies based on the quality of their work. Now, get in touch with all of them to discuss your needs and goals, and see what they have to offer to you.
A good website design company takes its time to fully understand its clients before proceeding with work. This entails understanding the nature of their business, their client base, needs, wants, and goals. Another sign of a good web design agency is that it listens to you and answers all your questions without getting irritated. Also, the best design companies come up with custom-made designs and do not use templates that are readily available online and used by most.
Pro-Tip: This step requires a bit of legwork on your end but will be worth it in the long run. Have an idea of the kind of things that you like and don’t like in a website. Perhaps you’ve seen something on a website that you thought was particularly well done, or something you thought was awful. It doesn’t have to be from within your industry. However, taking a good look at your competitor’s websites and observing if there is anything in their web design that you strongly like or dislike can give you a clear idea of what it is you’re looking to do with your own website.
By this point, you must have gotten a good idea about which company can be the best to work with. You are ready to make a choice, but before you do that, make sure (for the last time) that you are going in the right direction.
Questions to Ask a Web Design Company to Ensure It Is the Right Choice
Here are some questions that will help you determine their tech-savviness and the quality of services:
- What CMS (Content Management System) do they work on?
- Do they offer ongoing optimization and maintenance services? They should!
- Will they optimize your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? They should!
Some Signs of a Good Web Design Company
- They listen to your ideas but also come up with their own
- They use responsive web designs
- They have a portfolio
- They keep up with the latest design trends, and this shows in their work
- Their work shows their creativity and its range
- They offer good customer support
The Final Word
As clichéd as it may sound, it is true that your website is your digital storefront. According to the 2017 Global Online Consumer Report, it is the most common source of product awareness for customers. Furthermore, a research survey found that 48% of digital buyers consider website design as the most important factor in determining a business’s credibility. Because of all these factors, it is only wise to take your time when choosing who you want to work with to create or redesign your business’s website.
Does all this sound like too much work?
Get in touch with Web Geeks – one of the best web design Windsor companies. We not only have a team of professional website designers that are the best at their work but also have years of experience working with a wide range of businesses all over the world. We know what it takes for a website to stand out in the highly competitive and crowded digital world, and we can do it for you. Contact us to learn more about our process and to discuss your needs and goals.
Image Credits
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash