How Do I Choose a Web Designer?
The best way to familiarize yourself with a web designer is to spend time at their own business website. As you review the work of a web design company, ask yourself:
- Do their links work throughout their own site?
- Are the graphical images and photos they're using in focus and in color?
- Is the idea behind their web design original or does it look like a template?
- Can you view the web designer's client list or portfolio?
- Can you find the web designer's own website in the search engines?
- Can you find their clients' sites online using a keyword search?
It's not just about the price - it's also about originality in concept and successful search engine placement. Research their ranking and review their client designs. If you don't like what you see and you can't find any of their web sites online, the web designer probably won't be able to do much better for you.
Why Should I Hire a Web Design Professional?
With the advent of do-it-yourself HTML software, it is relatively simple for anyone to create a functional web site. We all know someone who designs web sites as a sideline using DIY web design software. This also explains why there are so many poorly designed web sites - if someone has a paintbrush, it doesn't make them Van Gogh!
Let's look at the following scenario:
Scenario: You're convinced that anyone can design a website so you hire your nephew (he has a copy of FrontPage he'd like to try) or you hire an employee's relative who "creates websites in her spare time".
The Result: Your website does not have the professional look that is evident in your other marketing pieces so the first impression might not be a positive one. Your site could be cumbersome for web site visitors to navigate and the pages might take too long to load, causing people to leave your website without contacting you.
The Real Problem: From their first impression, website visitors do not take your business seriously and they choose to take their business to your competitor.
Web Design is a unique design medium and requires extensive knowledge in designing graphics specifically for the Internet. The optimization of each page for the search engines is ongoing since all of the search engines change their algorithms and indexing methods constantly, requiring a great deal of continuous education. Properly marketing a site online continues long after the launch of the site and, again, online promotion requires a lot of time, of which you might have very little to spare!
Hiring a professional web design team will save you time and money in the long run and bring you the results you need for online marketing.
What is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and all of our web sites are designed with search engine placement in mind. That means your web site will rank well in a keyword search on search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, to name a few.
When researching web designers for your project, find out how often they participate in accredited seminars such as Search Engine Marketing conferences. (Our SEO team attends conferences and participates in online webinars.)
Search engines change their algorithms and indexing methods constantly, requiring a great deal of continuous education on the part of your web designer. The Unvierse Design SEO team participates in conferences, forums and discussion boards to provide content rich websites for today's Internet. Then we let the search engines increase your website traffic, naturally.
What is a Fair Price for Web Design?
The average web designer quotes an estimate based on $60 - $125 per hour. The proposal you receive will be a "questimate" at best and you will more than likely end up paying more at the end of your design project than originally proposed.
At Unvierse Design, we quote all of our projects as a package flat fee so you know in advance what your project will cost you. All future maintenance is billed at $60 an hour, which is very competitive for professional and award-winning web design services.
What is Included in the Price?
Make sure you ask the web designer what the proposed price covers. It should include the page layout, image and logo manipulation, transfer of your pages to your web host server and submission to the search engines and directories using the META tags the web designer formatted. In reality, it should cover your web site project beyond Internet launch!
If a web designer quotes an hourly fee, remember that your final invoice might be higher than your initial quote, plus there might be hidden fees for search engine submission and other miscellaneous services.
The Unvierse Design team offers package pricing so you know up front what your web site project will cost. One-time manual search engine submission is included in our set price.
Who Submits My Web Site to the Search Engines?
Some web designers do not submit your web site once it is finished and online, or they might charge you an extra fee to provide this service just once. Your web site has to be manually submitted to the search engines.
As web designers, our job is not just about building unique web sites for our clients and this is really only 50% of our job. Our efforts can continue long after the launch of your web site. Unvierse Design offers an optional aggressive search engine service for one year, which ensures that your web site remains indexed.
What are META tags?
Every page should have three META tags in the header of your web site: Title, Description and Keywords. META tags are an important part of your page which allows your web site to be found by search engines and directories when someone performs a search. You should never have to pay extra for META tags.
All of our clients rank very high on the search engines in their preferred focus area. We do not subscribe to any type of tricks, magic or gimmicks. We build honest, content-rich web sites that incorporate today's search engine technology.
How Do I View META Tags?
You can view META tag formatting on any web site on the Internet by viewing the HTML source code on the web page. If you're using Internet Explorer, visit the home page of your web site. Click on View | Source and your Notepad program will launch with the HTML source code in text format. You should be able to see at least three tags in the top tag - Title, Description, and Keywords.
Each and every business needs some kind of online presence. What should you look for in a web designer? What services should they provide? What is SEO?
