Choosing a web designer sounds easy. They’re certainly enough of us out there to make finding one a snap, and we all have portfolios of work that should make it easy to select the right style and move forward from there.
As any business owner who has been burned by the wrong creative team can tell you, however, there’s a lot more to finding the right web designer than firing up Google and seeing who has the right artistic style. In fact, that’s one of the easiest ways to waste money and find yourself frustrated.
With that in mind, let us share with you the best and worst ways to pick a web designer to work with…
Let’s Start With the Worst Way to Find a Web Designer
The worst way to find a web designer is actually the approach that most business owners and executives take. They realize they need a new website, and then look for either the lowest price, or the creative team that has experience with their type of business.
In most cases, choosing the cheapest web designer you can find is almost always going to come back to haunt you. If someone is charging less than other professionals in the area, there is likely to be a very good reason why. It might be that they outsource most of their work, don’t have much real-world experience, or can’t keep clients because they are difficult to work with.
And in the same way, picking a web designer just because they’ve worked with another business like yours is a similarly bad idea. In theory, it’s nice to have a creative team that already understands what you do and how you find clients. In reality, though, that’s the easy part of the job. Building a web presence that’s going to be a profitable asset for your business takes a lot more than industry knowledge.
So What’s the Best Way to Find a Web Designer?
Now that we’ve covered what you shouldn’t do, let’s take a look at a better strategy. This one involves considering budgets and industry experience, but also focuses on the web designers approach, commitment to service, and track record of success.
You don’t just want an artist who creates beautiful webpages, but one that will be responsive to your ideas and inspirations. They should be a partner who will work with you to understand not just what your website needs to look like, but which business goals you want to achieve.
In addition, you want to go beyond portfolios and look at case studies or other indicators of actual results. In other words, did the web designers’ clients actually make money from the websites that were built, or do they just look good online while contributing nothing to the bottom line?
There are a lot of web design companies out there, and finding the right one for your business can be a challenge. It gets a lot easier, however, if you know the right way to go about the job.