7 Questions When Shopping For a Website Designer
Here’s a scenario:
You are a business owner, and you want a website. You go onto the internet and search for “website designer Houston Texas.” Your search pulls up a jillion possibilities.
You call a couple and the people you speak with are fast-talking and they use a lot of jargon you don’t understand. You ask for explanations for the abbreviations they use, and you don’t understand the explanations.
Probably who you are talking to is the salesman for the company, not the technician. The salesman knows the abbreviations but not REALLY what they mean.
So, the conversations are essentially useless. So how can you make a decision? It’s a shot in the dark, AND it’s a lot of money. You just pick the guy you liked best on the phone.
And the website you get is so elementary, the information on the site isn’t what you told them (like hours or even address), and the site loads up so slowly you could take a nap while it’s loading.
Now what?
Second scenario:
You are a new business, and you need a website. So, you call three of your friends with websites to get referrals. You are referred three different companies.
You go out on the web to see what your friends’ websites look like. You pick one website that you think you like, and you call that company.
You speak to a salesperson who immediately flips you into the sales pitch, “You saw our work, the amount for a comparable website is $XXXX.XX, let me send you an invoice and we can get started.”
You work with the technical department for a couple of days, and the website you get doesn’t even COMPARE to your friend’s website. It somehow looks off on the spacing, the pictures are stock pictures, not the ones you sent to the designer, and you get something called a “404 error” when you try to go to one of the pages of the site.
In both scenarios, you are not going to get your money back. The problem with the sites is you – you didn’t have enough education before you ordered the website to know what you were ordering.
So, I’ve put together a quickie list of questions to ask whoever you speak to when you are shopping for a website. This list is for beginner shoppers so they are not defenseless with the technological gurus they will be speaking with. Don’t be disturbed if you don’t understand some of the terms – I’m giving you the appropriate answers to the questions you should ask.
Here goes.
Please give me five samples of your websites.
This is critical, because if the samples don’t in any way resemble your type of business, the designer may have no experience with copy (the writing) for your type of website.
Pay attention to the samples, see if you like the layout, see if the copy would be something that would effectively sell your product.
Then, you can say to the designer: I like the look of websiteXXX.com. Can we use that basic layout?
What program do you use for website programming?
Wix?
WordPress?
Another program?
WordPress is the most used program to create websites. Wix is good but is for more elementary programming than WordPress. WordPress is also more versatile and has more plug-ins available to programmers. Plug-ins are pre-programmed pieces of a prospective website that allow a website to perform a specific function: e-commerce (selling something online), contact form (a form that someone puts in their name, address, and other information), and other pre-programmed functions.
- Will you use a theme to build my website or is the design customized?
Themes are ok to use for websites, but you want to view the theme the designer picks because you might not like the placement of the pictures and words on the pages.
Also, if a theme is used, there is a lot of unused garbage often left on the website because of the pre-programming of the theme that the website designer doesn’t use. Insist that “pages” not used are removed from the design before it’s paid for. The additional pages will become a problem in the future when Google starts to “crawl” the pages of the website. And if you decide to add SEO to your website (which is a completely different type of programming) the extra pages become problematic.
Will my website look just like the one you used as the sample, websiteXXX.com?
Recently, I ran across a client that was shown great websites as examples of programming, and when she received her website, it was totally different, very disorganized, the copy (writing) was terrible, the whole construct of the website was terrible.
She started arguing with the developer, who did end up completely re-programming her website. My opinion is if the client hadn’t been so insistent and angry, she would have had a terrible website and would have hired someone else to do another one.
Will my website be optimized for responsiveness?
This is a system used by programmers to make sure your website fits on a computer screen, a mobile phone screen, tablets/iPads, and all other kinds of devices.
This takes special programming, and since 80% of the web searches done today are on mobile phones, it is critical the website design allows for viewing of the site on all devices people use for searches.
Some WordPress themes are optimized, and some are not. You have to test them out on the different devices.
Optimization and indexing.
This process should be part of the charge of the website. If it’s not done, the search function to find your website on a Google search just won’t work. Make sure that is in your contract with the developer.
Recently, I ran into a designer that was charging extra for this process. This was not told to the
client before the website was ordered. And of course, the company owner didn’t understand there were to be additional charges on the back end of the development of the website.
Speed
Loading speed must be a top priority.
Customers on the internet have the expectation that a website, even on their phone, should load up in less than 3 seconds. If a website takes 9 seconds to load, 38% of your customers will bounce out.
There are lots of ways to speed up a website load time:
- Optimize images
- Implement caching
- Minification
- And several other technical processes.
What you as the customer should ask for before paying for the website, is what will be the speed of the website loading. While a designer will not guarantee speed, you will have put him/her on notice that you will be checking speed when the prototype is delivered for approval.
After the website is developed, I will need the “credentials.” This would include username and password to get into the programming of the website.
If the designer says, “That would not be possible,” tell them thank you for your time.
The credentials are what you would need if you changed website designers. This process happens more than you would think – you might want your website to be different and the original website designer might try to charge you as much as the original website, or you may want to add SEO to the website, and you would need the credentials for that.
ALSO, there are companies that essentially RENT you your website. You won’t ever actually OWN your website. You must be very careful with this – and how this sets up is you only pay a monthly fee – forever.
Owning a website breaks down into several categories:
- Acquisition of a URL This is the .com portion – the name of your site
- Design, optimization, indexing This should be a set one-time fee
- Hosting This is billed annually
- Maintenance This is billed annually, and is critical to the health
of the website long term, Google does strange things.
- Updates Find out what is the hourly charge for updates
Google likes when a website is regularly “tweaked”
All of the issues I have discussed above blend together to give you the possibility of receiving a better website. If the designer you are speaking with doesn’t know any of the issues that are in this blog, you are speaking with someone who doesn’t have enough experience to produce a product that will give you the return on investment you need with your website.
Be careful out there. It gets really expensive really fast.