If you’re planning on establishing a strong online presence for your business, chances are you end up searching for an experienced and reliable web designer that will help you take your entrepreneurial venture to the next level.
So, how do you hire a professional web designer and how do you make sure the entire hiring process goes smoothly?
Go on reading today’s article to know what things you need to ascertain before any web development starts on your small business website.
Asking the right questions can save much bother and expenditure in the long run. Let’s dive into it.
1. Does My Web Dev’s Website Look Good?
If you’re planning on availing yourself of website development services, the first thing you want to ask yourself is whether their website resembles the website of your dream. Or, at least make sure nothing confuses or disappoints you about its design.
Does the company or a person you want to hire actually have a website?
Does it function the way it’s supposed to?
Is anything broken?
Someone’s own website serves as pretty good evidence of whether they can do the job.
If the website of your potential web dev looks outdated, lacking essential features, or fails to work on the popular platforms, you want to refrain from using their services.
2. What Am I Really Paying For?
In today’s day and age, with the CMSs, web builders, templates, and themes available out of the box, you need to be sure you’re paying for the creation of a unique custom website that will serve your specific business needs.
It’s not a secret that good website frameworks have already been created, and the process of building a website isn’t about how that’s all put together or coded.
There’s already the acceptable pattern and way of doing that.
It’s more about how the information put on the web page communicate and convey your brand position, your messaging in order to accomplish the goal you set for your business.
Make sure you’re paying for expertise apart from investing into bare-bones building of the website.
3. Do I Own My Domain?
Next, you want to ask your potential web design agency whether you’ll be actually owning your domain.
You might be surprised to learn that in reality, lots of agencies buy the domain on behalf of their business owners as part of the process and fail to transfer the ownership of the domain to clients.
As a result, you may end up having an effective website with a great domain name for your business, which, regrettably, is not yours.
The best way for you to avoid this sad scenario is to make sure the ownership is transferred to you.
Even better – buy your domain name yourself to be able to fully control it.
4. Am I going to Use a CMS?
The next thing you want to ask your designer is whether or not they are going to use a CMS.
A CMS is essentially a content management system.
There are bespoke and mainstream content management systems out there you can use as the example when designing your own website. But ultimately, you want to be able to once our website goes life make minor changes and edits to your product in terms of the text content.
While wholesale changes like layouts and images might be an issue and cost you more, make sure to discuss your intention to use the CMS with your designer in good time.
5. Do I have Analytics Installed?
The last question will tie into marketing and that is make sure you have analytics installed as part of the process and even better – ask them to install the Google Tag Manager.
If you’re not analytics-savvy, never used analytics up before, or looking for a professional marketing agency to manage all this stuff, adding the analytics tracking to you website it critical to your business’ success.
With this feature, you’ll be able to future-proof your website marketing.
Hopefully the recommendations you’ve just familiarized yourself with will go a long way towards helping you pick a company that will create an effective website for your business.
