How to select a Web designer

By Will Hamilton, Find a Web Designer

Before you select a designer for your first Web site, you need to answer three questions:

1. What do you want to achieve with your site?
2. How much money can you afford to spend on it?
3. How much time can you devote to it?

1. What do you want to achieve with your site?
For the sake of simplicity, we've identified three types of Web site. Decide which of these best fits the kind of site you're looking to build:

i. The advert - company description and contact details only

This is probably the cheapest type of site to set up and requires the least maintenance. Using Web page templates, just about any designer should be able to knock up this sort of site very quickly. You shouldn't get too concerned with fancy graphics, but should instead concentrate on two key issues - content and access.

Content - is it easy for the visitor to establish what you do?
Access - can visitors find your contact details immediately?

You need to register with as many search engines and relevant directories as possible. META tags and descriptive phrases will ensure your details display in response to relevant key searches - look at the techniques your competitors use and emulate them.

ii. The sales support office - company description, contact details,feedback form, product specifications, manuals, brochures, and frequently asked questions

With this kind of site you're aiming to make life easier for your sales staff, your customers and your prospective customers. You might be more concerned with graphics and artistic presentation, but again you should concentrate on the two key issues of content and access.

Content - MUST be useful, accurate and up to date. This will be harder to achieve because of the volume of information you're making available.

Access - Navigation must be quick, easy, intuitive and consistent. Indexing should be thorough. Your domain name should be as intuitive as possible, and you should register with as many search engines and relevant directories as possible.

iii. The shop - company description, contact details, product catalogue and payment system

This is a full e-commerce venture and the big problems are not with the design or even the payment mechanism, but with the integration of your existing sales system and order fulfilment. Unless you're already running a mail order/catalogue sales division, you shouldn't be considering this as your first Web undertaking.

If you're determined to build an e-shop, you need to remember that the only real likelihood of payback will come from the reduction in the cost of processing sales. If you can simplify the sales order process so visitors can place orders direct, you should be able to reduce the number of staff involved in processing orders.

E-business will make a big difference, but not necessarily to you and not necessarily right now, so you need to approach with caution. Recouping your setup costs will be a challenge and the cost of running a site like this will be higher than the cost of running one of the other two types of site.

2. How much money can you afford to spend on it?

There are designers to suit every pocket, but you must bear in mind that the cost of creating a Web site is a small percentage of the running costs.

You need to check whether the quoted costs include acquiring a suitable domain name and hosting it on a suitable server. Will it include email accounts and will they be redirected to your existing accounts? What will be the costs of ongoing maintenance and enhancements?

At the most basic level the running costs must cover:

• Domain name rental
• Web space rental
• Cost of updating content
• Cost of monitoring email accounts
  

The updating of content and monitoring email could involve extra work for existing staff or additional staff entirely. Do you have anyone with the confidence to get involved with techie issues like these?

3. How much time can you devote to it?

This doesn't refer to the time you can devote to the exciting creative bits at the beginning, but the dull repetitious bits such as proofreading, regularly checking search engines (perhaps weekly or at least monthly, checking details are still accurate and links still work, updating news items and so on. If your Web site has basic mistakes in it, it will cost you potential customers and could weaken relationships with existing customers.

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start your search.

What to look for

The easiest way to find a designer that can produce the sort of site you
want is to look for sites that look right to you.

• Spend some time browsing sites of companies you know, both in and outside of your speciality, to get an idea of what others are doing.
• Search on the major search engines for your type of business and see what
  comes up.
• Talk to other local businesses and see if they can recommend local designers.

After you've found some sites that look interesting, there are three potential ways to identify the designer:

• Some sites will have a link to their designer
• Look them up in the Find a Web Designer database using the client URL search
• Contact the owners of the site and ask them - be warned that not every company will be prepared to disclose the identity of their designer and some will have built their Web site in-house.

The next step is to test your first list of designers against the following
basic criteria to come up with a short list:

• Does the designer offer the sort of service you want within your price range?
• Will the subsequent running costs be within your reach?
• Will they produce what you want within the desired timescale? This is really important as a test to ensure the designer has the resources to see you through to the end of the project. Hundreds of design companies fold each year and with well over 2,000 active companies in the UK (most commonly with only three staff), this is still a volatile area.
• Can you meet and talk to the individual responsible for designing your
  site? Don't believe the hype that a designer can be based anywhere in the world - if you cannot meet face-to-face with the person designing your site easily, it's unlikely to arrive correctly, on time and on budget, unless it's the
  most basic of sites.
• Are they the sort of people you can work with? We all have different approaches to our work and this has an impact on how effective we are in teams. Your designer should be able to fit in with how your team works.
• Will your designer act as a one-stop shop for all the basics? And if they do, is that as an agent managing other service providers, or as a sole provider?
  This is a matter of preference - some might worry they're putting all their eggs in one basket by using a sole provider, and think that a more broadly based business is more likely to be around in 12 months' time.

The short list

Once you have your short list, you should follow up on references, carry out any financial accounting checks, and have detailed discussions with your short-listed designers. This is the stage at which you need to establish (in writing) exactly which services will be provided, when they will be provided, by whom, and how much they will cost.

One final recommendation is to have discussions with all your short-listed design agencies and create a composite document from their proposals. This will help you ensure you've covered all areas and you can then send the document to each company to get comparable quotes.

Now you've identified what you want to build, who you want to build it and how much it will cost to build and run, it's time to go ahead and do it. So what are you waiting for? Go for it!

See http://www.fawd.co.uk/ for the Find A Web Designer database