Choosing the right website design company is one of the most important decisions that any business takes. Your website is in effect your shop-front and just like any conventional shop-front your window dressing needs to be top drawer in order to catch the eye of those passing window shoppers and tempt them inside. Even when people know of your site and are visiting to check out your business offer the look and feel of the site is all important, so when you are selecting the website designer to design you a professional website in addition to offering a number of optional extras like search engine optimisation (website marketing), here are a few points that you should consider.

Firstly, have a peek at their website. Does it look like a professional website? Remember that as well as being your “shop-front”, your website also represents your image, your brand, and it determines how people perceive your business. Your brand image is all important. If it looks like a professional website (neat, tidy, discrete functional, yet classy) it instils confidence in the visitor. If the website design company’s own website displays all of these characteristics, you can be sure that they fully understand these important fundamentals of website design, and that you are more likely to end up with that professional website look and be proud to conduct professional seo or website marketing on it too.

Read through their general business offer and their mission statement. Does it sound business like? Does it tell you how they go about their business? Does it tell you their ethical approach, how they interpret their client’s ideas and aspirations? Does their website carry a list of testimonials of companies that have used their services? Do they welcome you to contact those companies for performance reviews on their work? What you don’t want to see is meaningless hyperbole that has simply been reeled off as fluffy sales banter. You want to see substance, purpose, industry knowledge, industry experience, and a professional website ethic.

On the functional, practical front, how does their site perform? Does their website form up on the screen promptly when you first land on it? How does it rate on site navigation? Are the options laid out clearly? Is it easy and fast to move from page to age? Do they use latest cutting edge technology, such as video streaming? All of these points are important because this is how you want your own site to function. Your potential website designer’s website is their shop-front. They know that that is how you will judge them. Only select them if they can tick all of the boxes 100%.

Finally you also need to ascertain that they know what they are talking about. Do they understand SEO (search engine optimisation), and will they build it into your site as a matter of course. This is something that you need to discuss with them as it will not be obvious from merely visiting their website. SEO is the process by which your site is ranked by the big search engines like Google and Yahoo. Search engines use “spiders” to crawl the internet looking at sites and ranking them within their markets, so that when web “traffic” is searching for the sorts of goods or services your website fronts, your business is one of the first to be listed on the search engine reports. In theory, the higher your search engine ranking, the more visitors your site will attract. When your professional website is designed, a good website designer will build in certain compatible features that make it easy for the search engine spiders to find your site and to be able crawl all over it to extract the information that they are searching for. If your site is properly SEO’d, it will win you more business.

We’ll publish some more articles in this series in the coming days that will give you more information on choosing your website design agency.