Questions To Ask A Website Designer

What To Look For When Researching A Website Designer And Their Services

Although this website focuses on the "You Can Create A Website Yourself" approach, in order to help you save money, I appreciate it is not always a case of you having to save money. Some of you might have enough money but not enough time, especially in the area of website creation as a whole.

So in this section I am assuming money is no obstacle but time is and therefore you would like to hire a "Professional Website Designer". I am not going to recommend one for you but what I am going to do is show you the type of features and services you should be looking for, and asking about, from your website designer as well as explaining some of the bad traits you might come across and should avoid.

What  Is  A  Website  Designer?

A website designer is basically a website consultant and planner for your particular website design needs. They do not have to be a website programmer or creator simply because they can contract your design out to someone else once they know what your website ideas and requirements are all about.

So in reality when you hire a website designer you are hiring their planning skills, their design skills, their knowledge of how the internet works, their website developers (staff) and other services.

Note: A website creator can be a website programmer or website builder software, but a website designer is a person who plans ahead, chooses colour schemes, fonts, backgrounds, decides whether or not to use flash animation, designs the layout and so on.....depending on how much leverage you give them of course. On top of this; A website designer normally has a, hired, team of up to five people working alongside them but this does not mean any less of a website designer working alone. On the other hand you could say "one person cannot know everything about website design or have the benefits of five others".

Think  About  Your  Website  Needs

Before hiring a website design service (website designer) you first need to think about your website and what you would like to see inside it. Ask yourself:

On top of those questions you should also ask questions about the credentials of the website design service you intend to use, and if necessary their website designer's credentials too. Find out exactly what it is they are offering you and what they are willing to do for your website. Look at their Portfolio for example. All good website designers have a portfolio, preferably on their own website as opposed to offline in a a4 folder, whereby you can judge whether or not they design bog standard (template looking) websites or create bespoke (custom-made) websites.

Contact their clients, if need be, to get the views of their designed website - Ask them about the website designer's personality. E-mailing the website designer does not always convey/justify their personality and the views of their clients, and many website designers know this; hence why the good ones put a contact telephone number on their website.

Questions  To  Ask  A  Website  Designer

Here are some questions to ask a website designer with regards to them and their website design services. Read the advice within them carefully because they could save you valuable time and money.

What experience do you have in Internet Marketing?

This is probably one of the most important questions you can ask a website designer today. Why? Because years ago all you would want and need was a website built, but these days you need a sales person and internet marketer behind your website designer. So ask them how they can maximise your website in order to sell your product(s) and/or service(s) and to promote your brand.

Ask them if they know about S.E.O (Search Engine Optimization), and more precisely how they would implement it for your website. Ask them if they have ever worked in a shop for example whereby they have served real-life customers, and perhaps sold them goods. And if they have, for how long? If they build you a website with a shopping cart for example ask them how they would help you to get traffic to that shopping cart and therefore sales (if they offer these promotional services of course).

This question relies heavily on the premise that the website designer offers this promotional service, and depending on your budget you might not even be able to afford their consultations because this is an ongoing thing. And even if you are going to do some of the work yourself you might not be able to afford its time and energy. For example. If they suggest "You must manually advertise in these 40 classified ad directories", can you afford the time involved in submitting forty ads and the monthly cost of each ad?

Remember this is just one suggestion. Will you be able to afford their other suggestions? such as "You must spend at least x amount on Google Adwords if you want that product of yours to be successful".

Tip: Go and view some of their client's websites and then do a search for those websites in a search engine. See if they come to the top of those search engines for certain keywords. Also look at their source code and meta-tag description keywords to see how the website designer implemented certain keywords and what programming languages they used. The source code can reveal many coding and marketing mistakes. In general carry out a history of each website (see the View A Website's History section).

What programming languages and softwares are you familiar with?

Asking a website designer this question will filter out the amateurs, cowboys and rip offs from the professionals. Meaning, the professionals will more than likely have a team of people who have knowledge of using various types of programming languages and software, with much of that software being very expensive. They should answer with "Basic programming languages - HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScriipt but we also know Java, AJAX, C and Perl". "Software - Adobe products such as Flash Professional CS5, Photoshop CS5 and Dreamweaver", on top of other well known softwares.

A rip off on the other hand will rely on their cheap £10 HTML Editor and £20 Website Template Builder simply because will not of spent the time (years) learning about these programming languages and expensive softwares and/or of spent the money needed to buy/use these languages/softwares. In other words; they will not be professional enough to invest in expensive video editing software (and hardware), design bespoke templates using expensive graphics packages or hand code the html, css and php for example (if necessary).

Do you offer a web hosting package as part of your service?

The reason for asking this question is because this is were you could get stung. A web hosting package (web space) and domain name (www website name) are needed to host (display) your website content on the internet, of course (see the Research Host Features), but as these are constantly becoming much cheaper it might be worth you getting these separately yourself. So you also have to ask if you are allowed to use your own web hosting package.

Saying this; If you are not confident with separately purchasing and managing your own website hosting package(s) and domain name(s) you might want to go with the website designer's package, regardless of costs, to avoid complications/irritations later. Their package will normally include one year of free web hosting with a domain name of your choice. This should lead you to asking them about that package though - How much web space and bandwidth will I get each month? How many e-mail addresses will I get? Will I have full control of that package? because everything will be registered in my name? And so on.

After Creation, How Many Times Can My Website Be Modified?

Many website designers will create your website for a set fee and that is that, whereas other website designers will create your website and then charge a monthly fee thereafter for any requested modifications you may have within that month (within reason of course).

Some may charge £20 a month for minor text and picture changes whereas others might charge £5 just for adding one extra picture for example. This has nothing to do with the picture, it is about the time it takes them to edit your template, login to your web hosting account and upload the picture. Not all website designers do this service though - They may not have the time to mess about with minor monthly modifications because their time is better spent designing a new client's, more profitable, website creation.

Will You Automatically Submit My Website To The Search Engines?

This is one of those questions you need to ask simply because the answer can be taken two ways. The good and bad answers.

Good (YES WE DO) because the website designer might submit your domain name (website address/url) to as many as 200 search engines. Bad (YES WE DO) because you do not know which search engines they will be, not unless you specifically request this information. This is because they do not normally advertise the list of search engines they will submit to.

Good (NO WE DO NOT) because we know it does not really make that much difference once your domain name has been submitted to Google anyway, either by you or ourselves. Bad (NO WE DO NOT) because it means you will have to manually submit your domain name to each search engine you want your website to be listed in. As said though; Once Google knows of your website, other search engines will too.

What Are Your Prices?

This question may surprise you because you would think the prices would be displayed on the website designer's website, but surprisingly many of them are still old hat (dinosaurs) in that they think their competitors will undercut them or something if they display prices, so they supply a "Fill In Our GET A QUOTE Form" and/or "E-Mail Us For A Quote" option instead.

I have e-mailed a few UK Based website designers to get quotes and the prices vary tremendously. Some charge between £190 to £495 for a basic, static, 10 page website whilst other charge £10 per page. For bespoke websites I received quotes from £100 per page to £1,500+ for the same basic, static, 10 page website. Many of these prices did include web hosting packages ranging from as little as £39.95 a year up to £59.99 a year but this also depended on the features of the web hosting package.

Ask  More,  Deeper,  Questions  If  Need  Be

The above questions are typical, standard, questions you should be asking a website designer, but obviously you should ask your own unique questions and dig deeper if necessary, especially if certain things are not presented to you (outlined) that clearly at first. For example, you might ask who is the owner and copyright holder of the finished website - You (because you paid for it), them (because they designed it and used copyrighted/licensed material) or both of you (because of the just said reasons).

The  Creation  Process  And  Payment

So how does the website creation process work? Well this really does depend on the website designer, but in many cases it will be something like this:

Conclusions

It is impossible for me to recommend a website designer or website design service simply because they all differ, as you can see from the information above, so all I can recommend is that you do what I did and contact the website designers and website creation services websites directly via e-mail.

Remember though. Anyone can seem professional behind wording on a website and in an e-mail, so always contact them via telephone (after e-mailing them for details and prices) before you actually go ahead and have some work done by them. That way you will be able to benefit from using even more of your natural intuition and common sense.