How To Find The Right Website Design Company
Website designers are experts at creating web pages that look good and function properly. They also understand how search engines work so they can optimise sites for better rankings in search results. Here are a couple of pointers to ensure you find the best web design company for your next website project.
1 - Check out their portfolio.
You should check out a website designer's portfolio before hiring them. This will give you a sense of what kind of design style they prefer and whether they're able to produce high quality work. This will also give you an idea of how well they can design and if they are just creating websites from pre-made templates (which often creates 'code-bloat' and hinders your Search Engine results).
2 - Read reviews about them.
If you do decide to hire a web designer, make sure to read online reviews about them. These reviews will help you find out how satisfied customers were with their services. There are always going to be grumpy reviewers - that's just the nature of the web - but good web design companies will have long term clients, that have possibly built several websites with the same web company and have only good things to say about them.
3 - Quiz them on ideas to grow your business through your new website.
A good website design company will be able to give you ideas to separate you from the masses of templated and bloated websites online. It will also display if they are 'cookie-cutter' web designers just filling in the blanks of a template, or if they are experienced web designers and developers that know a thing or two about making your website really work online.
4 - Talk to them about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Not all web design companies are SEO experts, but I highly suggest using a company that knows a LOT about the subject. There are three main types of SEO...
- On-page SEO – Includes web pages – Blogs, product copy, web copy, images etc.
- Off-page SEO – Anything which happens away from your website that helps with your SEO Strategy, e.g. Backlinks.
- Technical SEO – How well your website is built and performs for Search Engines – includes; site indexing to help bot crawling, PageSpeed Insights, mobile performance and more.
You mainly want to quiz them on their Technical SEO prowess, as this is the foundation of your website and is particularly hard to fix once the website is built and live. This includes, which CMS to use, hosting, good development principles for SEO, optimising the website for speed and performance and more.
5 - Meet the team, including the designers and developers that will be allocated to your project
A good Web design company usually has a dedicated Project Manager, web designers and web developers that will be dedicated to your website project. It's a good idea to talk with the team to get a feel for how well they know their roles and how you will be interacting with them. All to often a web design company will show you their best work and reviews, only to use a newbie or someone outsourced overseas which won't give nearly the same result.
I hope this helps, and if you need any help, we are more than willing to have a chat to see
if Fuel is a good fit for your next web design project.