Guide - Choosing a Website Designer

[Caveman Joe]

I was in Chester yesterday, hawking my wares to the local shopkeeps, and was as usual shocked and depressed to learn of the local design companies ripping off the general public. So, I've written this short guide on how to make sure your web designer or developer is legit. Enjoy!

Choosing a Web Designer
There are millions of website designers out there, hundreds of thousands of companies, and thousands of cowboys. Choosing one to build your site can be very, very difficult, and people get ripped off every day – but here are some tips to help you find a reputable designer.


1. Make sure they don't use templates.

Pre-built website templates aren't for designers; they're for people without any technical knowledge or design skills who want to knock up a website in an hour or so. There is no shame in using pre-made templates for personal sites, but a designer should never have to use them – and for a business site to be based on a template is very unprofessional. There could be a hundred other sites out there that look exactly the same as yours – not terribly handy for a business that wants to distinguish itself from the competition. If the company you're checking out uses templates, you may as well build the site yourself.


2. Make sure they don't lock you into their hosting.

I went to see some folks in Chester today who'd been ripped off by their designers - they built an E-commerce website from a template, made the customer insert his own products, and charged him £450 for the privilege. Even more obscenely, they then expected him to pay three hundred pounds a year for hosting.

Sadly, this sort of scam is all too prevalent. Get the company's hosting rates in writing – or, better yet, host the site yourself. If they offer to host it for free for the first year, that's fine – it's an accepted industry standard. But make sure that you're free to move your site to another host, and that your domain name is registered to yourself in case of disputes.

You can find out who a domain name is registered to by running a WHOIS check. Test a few of the sites in the designer's portfolio, to make sure they're not registering their clients' domains under their own name.


3. Always look for testimonials that can be backed up with contact details or web addresses, a portfolio site hosted on a proper domain name (anything that sounds spammy like super-cheapwebsites-4u-2day.me.uk should be avoided) and a good command of written English. If they confuse "your" with "you're," or "it's" with "its," or "there" with "they're" or "there," they will make your company look horribly unprofessional and untrustworthy.


4. Use the W3C validation service to test their portfolio website for code errors. If they can't make code that passes validation for their own website, how well do you think they'll write yours?


5. Test their portfolio site, and sites they've made for clients, in at least both FireFox and Internet Explorer, to make sure that they display correctly. They don't have to look exactly the same – they probably won't, thanks to Internet Explorer's blatant disregard for Web standards – but make sure that you can at least move around the site and make sense of it, and that it looks half-decent.


6. If the designer uses a Hotmail address, run. If they won't give you a contact telephone number, run. Mobile numbers are acceptable and normal, due to the transitory nature of website designers, and shouldn't carry the stigma that they'd be associated with in other industries. If they ask to communicate via MSN or some other online messaging protocol rather than via telephone, run - unless they've got a damn good reason. Check to see if they're tax-registered, and that they'll be able to furnish you with an invoice and receipt, on letterheaded paper.


7. Meet up with your designer in person if you can. Obviously this is hard if they're overseas, but if you live nearby, ask if they charge a consultation fee - there's still no accepted standard for this, so some will and some won't. Consultation fees, therefore, shouldn't hold any reflection on the character of the designer - but, of course, should come into consideration when you're figuring out your budget.


8. Determine whether or not the designer will charge you for updates to your website, whether or not you'll be able to easily update your site yourself, and whether or not they'll still be around in a year's time to help you out with it. Contact the customers listed in their Testimonials section for confirmation, if needs be.


9. As a just-in-case, Google their business name (in quotation marks) just to see if there's any negative feedback left in forums. Don't ever buy website design services from eBay. Ever. Seriously.


10. Although this may run counter to a few of the things I've already said, be very wary of large companies offering website design services. The smaller companies, sole traders and partnerships, always do a better job for much less money.

11. Nobody can guarantee to get you a specific place in Google.
There are far too many variables, and too many of them beyond the developer's control, for anybody to reliably guarantee any given position in Google's rankings for any given keyword(s). If your considered developer offers such a guarantee, they are lying.

12. If your designer or developer offers "copy protection" for your website, again, they are lying. No effective form of copy protection has ever been created, and never will be, no matter what anybody claims. This is as inviolable as the law of gravity or relativity.
It is much better to accept that people will steal from you, and turn that to your advantage. Google "Creative Commons," "Cory Doctorow," and, more recently, "Radiohead" for inspiration.


I hope these tips help to steer you away from disreputable designers, but remember to use your common sense, shop around, and keep your wits about you.


If you'd like to check out my own services, please feel free to have a look at Professional, classy website design in Cheshire : Stainless Design (for web design) and Hosting For A Quid (for web hosting). Please feel free to reprint this article, but please do not modify it or remove my links.


Good luck!

[hotwired]

Thanks for this. I am a designer and often have new clients who have fallen victim to such nonsense. One of your tips about domains registered in their name woke me up a bit, see I often register domains of my clients behalf and my program automatically adds my contact info to everything! Just a bit of laziness on my part.

I do ask that clients use my hosting simply becasue of the environment that I'm used to as well as the fact that I am much for willing to give them more "free" service, because they're renting space from me for $11-$16.50 per month. In other words, I really enjoy changing some text on a page for a client or finding a better photo for them then telling them "no charge". It's sort of a numbers game. If you've got 100 people paying you $11 per month and 90 of them require zero effort during a particular month, but 10 of them need 5 minutes of tweaks or edits, you can do this and still profit just fine and give fantastic service.

definitely on the templates. I SORT of use templates but they're not REALLY tempaltes, they're just the basic outline of the website organized so I just have to add my hand created headers, etc. But DO stay away from "photoshop" templates. I cannot edit one of those things to save my life and they're not particularly seo friendly

SEO guarantees, etc. is the big one. People who are not "web saavy" will say things like "I can't find my site on the net" so you have to be very patient with them and upfront and clear on the expectations. I've lost a few sales simply because I've refused to give guarantees and I tend to "undersell" this service if anything. Promise a little and deliver alot so they're pleasantly surprised.

Thanks again for taking the time to educate. I have tons more i could add but time is short.

My site is Maine Web Design - Central Maine Web by the way!

[Blueskied]

Are templates really that bad?
stevepavlina.com uses one, or am i wrong?
And the site is damn successful.

[JeremyW]

I'm starting out as a web designer too. My sit is at Hawke's Bay Web development That's good advice for developers also.

[hotwired]

Good Question!
I think when people talk of templates, they are often talking of different things but using the same word. The "bad" template would be those cheesy photoshop or other templates just throw together and you simply change the text and and maybe add a logo and put text on the 3-4 pages and you're done. Truthfully, the BEST designers use templates.

Template by THIS definition would simply be the "outline" html, tables or div tags setup for teh header, menu, body and footer as well as any dynamic or javascripts needed. THEN using CSS or other design techniques this template can be made to look 100 different ways.

Steve uses a "BLOG" or "CMS" system called WordPress, also called an online publishing system and yes, wordpress comes with 3-4 templates which you CAN tweak. People who use this program are often more concerned with the "writing" content vs. uniqueness of design, etc. Even mine looks pretty similar! Something is Happening - Personal, Spiritual development | Something is Happening

[Caveman Joe]

Depending on your definition of templates, yes, everybody sort of uses them. But the real question is how much effort the designer's going to put into making your site look unique.
When using a CMS, it's often rather necessary to start off with a very basic template, and then change everything around to fit your needs until it no longer resembles the original in any way, shape or form - who wants to remember all the various hooks and handlers that come with a CMS template?

Example:
Culture Shock - Webcomic and Hyperfiction started off on the same template as Geeklog - The Ultimate Weblog System. But they sure as hell don't look the same! Twisted Librarian - Book reviews, opinions, and places to buy, and Retro Reviews - Two joysticks, five thousand MAME Roms and far too much spare time, and CavemanJoe.co.uk - A complete waste of hosting all use the same basic template, and you can sort of tell from the layout, even if the graphics are all hand-built. But you certainly wouldn't mistake one site for another, and most people wouldn't notice the similarities if I didn't point them out.

What I'm getting at here is that if a designer just grabs a pre-made website from templatemonster, puts your stuff in it and then charges you half a grand for the 30 minutes it'll take, then you may as well have built the site yourself. There are very few professions who can justify charging a thousand pounds an hour, and website design isn't one of them. Sadly.