There are many businesses on the web offering website design services.
Even if you restrict your searches to local companies there are still many to choose from.
We would like to offer you a few tips on selecting a good web designer.
1. Test their site
You will have seen their website already.
But did you look past the design of the site (which is a matter of personal taste) and see whether it
works properly?
Here are a few things to check:
- Performance
Does the site load quickly enough? This is subjective but as a rule the faster a website responds the better.
There is a tendency to embellish websites with fancy images which do more to show off the
skills of the designer than to promote the site. Complex images are large and take time to load, they are useless
if users leave before the site has loaded! Some web design companies forget that many users still have slow
internet connections.
- Navigation
Can you move around the site easily and locate what you were looking for?
Do you get lost in the site?
Do any pages lead you up a blind alley with no obvious way out?
- Broken links
Can you traverse all the links on a site? If any of the links to other parts of the site are broken this is totally
unacceptable, indicating poor quality control and testing.
If a site links to an external website it is not always possible to ensure that the external site is available
all the time. However it is unacceptable if this is common occurrence as it suggests poor site maintenance.
- Form filling
Many websites have on line forms that the user can complete (this site has three).
Usually these forms work but what happens if the user does not fill them in correctly?
Some simple tests often show a surprising lack of attention to detail. Many websites have a form to email the site owner.
Try pressing the send button without filling the form in and see what happens. It can be
quite revealing! Try entering an invalid email address, by this we mean one that is formatted incorrectly or has spaces
in it. Does the form tell you which parts must be completed and then check that they are?
- Quality
Check for spelling errors
Do graphics such as page headers move around between pages? (watch out for the browser scroll bar when doing this test!)
Is the site consistent in its use of fonts, colours etc?
- Browsers
Most people use Internet Explorer as their web browser, however increasing numbers of people use other browsers such as Firefox and Opera.
We recommend installing Firefox (download it here) and running some simple tests. Look for graphics and text
that overlap, try changing the text size (from the View menu) and see if the page is still properly displayed.
Increasing the text size breaks a lot of web sites!
2. Test customer sites
If the web designers provide links to some of their customer sites try doing the same tests on
these. Do they give their customer sites the same attention to detail as their own?
3. finally...
Think about how you would like the development process to be managed, and what facilities they
provide for you to review work in progress. Our philosphy is to be as transparent as possible. As soon as prototype web sites
are available we publish them in a special password protected area only accessible to our clients. Each client has their own area.
This has two benefits, firstly our clients get early access to our work and can review the sites running in a real web environment, secondly
it prevents others from gaining and early and wrong impression from seeing a partially completed prototype.
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